>Re:PHOTO Peter Marshall - Thoughts on Photography

Derbyshire Walks

We took a quick trip to Derbyshire for a couple of days before Christmas. It was a little disappointing to find it was the one part of the country virtually without snow, but that did mean we actually got there from the snow-covered south of England without any great hitches, even though we travelled up on the last train on Saturday evening.

The journey – a train into London, the underground to St Pancras, an intercity service to Derby and then a local train to Belper – takes around four hours. We booked a couple of weeks in advance and got cheap tickets. They cost about the same as the first stage – under 20 miles from Staines to London – costs in the rush hour on its own – without the underground, the 130 miles to Derby and the 10 or so on to Belper. Really ticket costs on our railways make no sense.

We really went to see family, but the pictures on line are from a couple of walks that we did while there. From the windows of the bedroom we could see across part of the town to the hills around, and we walked around some of them. Pity about the lack of snow, but it was really cold out, and even in the town very different from being in Staines or London.

More pictures on My London Diary.

Housing Emergency

The current cold weather spell in the UK often makes us think of those without anywhere to sleep except on the streets and to be thankful that we have a decent place to live. Our house may not be a palace, but at least we can usually keep warm and dry inside it, even if sometimes I sit at the computer wearing a scarf and hat and wondering if I could possibly type ok wearing gloves.

Before we bought this house, I’d spent around around four years living in a series of privately rented flats, then three years in public housing in a flat that would could never have afforded to rent privately.

Around thirty years ago, government basically abandoned the idea of public housing, selling it off on the cheap to tenants, preventing a sensible level of investment in the sector and later hiving it off to housing associations. The latest proposals will mean that many families in high rent areas such as London will be unable to afford to stay in their homes as low wage earners will no longer get the current level of support needed for them to pay market rents.

It’s a policy that makes no sense and in practice will not work, at least not in London and the south-east, but is likely to cause a huge amount of hardship and chaos before things get sorted out. So not surprisingly a wide range of people and groups are opposed to it, but the protest in Whitehall a couple of weeks ago was a small one – later if the policy is enacted we may well see riots.

For now there wasn’t a great deal to photograph, or at least I couldn’t find a way to really make strong images.

This was perhaps my best attempt, and it was one where the image doesn’t really fit the 1.5:1 ratio frame – I think it would be better with a crop to the left edge of the red ‘Housing Justice’ banner.

There were a couple of MPs speaking, and the obvious way to photograph them was over the pile of cardboard boxes, so I got into the right position for that only to have a couple of colleagues ask me politely if I would move a little so that they could get the shot (I think they probably thought “as well”, but sometimes that isn’t possible, and I think this was one of those times.) Since I’d taken a few frames I moved, but I don’t think I’d got quite what I wanted.

Of course I’m almost always happy photographing people and gestures and this woman’s hands and expression I think express the worries of people well, and I almost managed to frame the placards how I wanted them – just a little too tightly cropped.

You can see the rest of the pictures – with more about the event – on My London Diary. Unfortunately although of course I also posted it to Demotix, I don’t think it made any of the papers; I think they were full of some royal nonsense and didn’t have space for anything serious.

Ivars Gravlejs – My Newspaper

Probably like many others I first came across the work of Latvian photographer Ivars Gravelejs through his ‘Useful advices for photographers‘ also published in The Gawno Magazine as 78 Photography Rules for Complete Idiots.

In Gawno it has a warning at the top “Don’t take it serious, please“, although there are quite a few things my long dead Aunty Vicky could have benefited by following; her colour slides often shown at family gatherings often reduced me to uncontrollable giggles and could have provided some very splendid illustrations for the series. But Gravlejs’s advice is of course hilarious, not least for being so dead-pan.

For those of a rather perverse spirit (and like me, Gravlejs is obviously one) it would be an interesting extension of this work to produce an updated version in which the “wrong” images were all sourced from the work of the great masters of the medium – and certainly the odd Cartier-Bresson, Rodchenko, Friedlander and others sprang into my mind. There are also a few well-known photographers whose oeuvre would have been considerably improved had they ignored rule no 15 “Before you start photographing remember to take the lens cap off.”

But what I really wanted to bring to your attention is another work by Gravlejs, ‘My Newspaper‘, made while he worked as a photojournalist for one of the major Czech daily newspapers, ‘Denik‘, an example of “subversive art” in which he deliberately manipulated some of the images he supplied, starting with small unimportant details of pictures and then moving on to considerably more radical interventions.

He exhibited this work in Prague in 2009 where the text spoke not just about the way in which his work challenges the authenticity and objectivity of media information (and makes me think why, when I expect much of the text to be fabrication we expect more of photographs) but also of the frustrations felt by many press photographers in having to photograph trivia for the papers rather than working creatively as photographers. Although I think few press photographers actually play with their pictures in Photoshop as he did, rather too many probably set up fictions for their camera to record.

The rest of Gravlejs’s site is also worth a look, and there are quite a few images that brought a smile to my face, many of them in various ways ‘bad’ photographs, and some clearly breaking those 78 rules.

Reviewing My Photos

I sometimes wonder how many good pictures I’ve taken and not noticed since I’ve moved to digital. In the old days, working on film I contact printed everything – including eventually colour as well as black and white, and the contacts went into a file. It was easy to sit down and leaf through these files, and when I went back to find a particular image I often be glancing through the pages in search of it and see other frames that looked interesting and mark those up for printing too.

Then came digital, and I tend to take a quick look through the whole set of images and select those I think worth processing further, and sometimes that’s it. Anything that doesn’t strike me on that initial look may never be seen again, although it may still be on my disk or in my backup.

I try always to go back and take a second look, but it is easy to forget, and when I’ve taken a large number of pictures it is certainly easy to miss things. So this morning when I had a little time and nothing absolutely urgent to do I went through the whole set of pictures from the last of the three days of student protests.

Mostly what I found were simple alternative takes of images I’d previously developed and already put on My London Diary. A couple might have been better than the ones that I’d actually used, but there wasn’t a great deal in it. But there was one which I’d missed completely.

It’s a picture I rather like of some of the students dancing in Parliament Square, and I took a dozen or so frames of this group, but almost all with the camera in portrait format. This was one of them, but the subject just didn’t fit the upright frame, with not much happening in the shadows at the bottom and too much blue sky on top. Cropped to landscape in the normal 1.5:1 format I work in doesn’t quite work, and the image above is roughly 1.38:1, noticeably squarer. I usually like to get the framing correct in camera, but it isn’t always possible, and in this case the moment was just that and had gone by the time I took the next frame almost immediately afterwards.

There were a few other things that I found that perhaps seemed more significant after I’d had time to consider the event more fully, for example the images showing the large padded placard book covers.

As well as finding a few from early on in the march, I also found a few more of them in use against the police barricade in Parliament Square, although I hadn’t really been able to get into a good position.

It was also a chance to prune the hopeless images from the event from my hard disk, flagging them as rejected by pressing the ‘x’ key in Lightroom as I went through the images and then using the menu at the end of the process to delete the whole lot. It’s a faster method than deleting them one by one as you go through.

One thing I find slightly annoying is that I can’t find a simple keystroke to ‘unflag’ a rejected image. I’d prefer it if the ‘x’ key acted as a toggle rather than having to use the mouse and menus to do so. Perhaps there is a reason for this, but I can’t see it.

Tagging images with a colour tag does toggle on/off in this way, whereas giving them a star rating doesn’t. So I could use a colour tag to select images for mass deletion as an alternative.

Finally, Day X3 Pictures

Various things have stopped me getting my pictures from Day X3, the third large student demo organised by the National Campaign Against Fees and Cuts two weeks ago on My London Diary before now.

It’s only partly sloth and general laziness. Partly Christmas coming and one or two things I had to do for that (including the odd party!) Going away for a few days didn’t help, nor did having a few other events to photograph. But more than anything it was the sheer number of pictures that I took on December 9th and the complexity of the event.

I’ve now put around 150 pictures covering the day from around noon in Malet St to when I left Whitehall and Parliament Square shortly after the vote.

This was one of the few events I’ve covered this year where having a UK Press Card really made a difference. Without it I would not have got back into Parliament Square around 4pm to take more pictures, and had I stayed there from earlier would have been trapped in the kettle with the rest of the protesters, perhaps not getting out until just in time to run for my last train home just before midnight, after having had my photograph taken by police.

Having a press card doesn’t stop you being threatened or assaulted by police, although unlike several of my colleagues on this occasion I only got threats, while they were hit by batons, kicked by police horses and had equipment smashed. At least one was convinced that he was picked out as a target because he was a press photographer. This time I emerged unscathed, partly because I’d earlier got rather badly crushed by the crowd and decided to go somewhere a little less dangerous.

Of course I might have taken some better pictures had I stayed longer, but certainly I would not have managed to get an article on Demotix by around midnight that same day as I did. The text of that article is now (with some slight corrections) on My London Diary, along with the 30 or so pictures I posted with it and quite a few more.

Deutsche Börse Ditto

When I saw the four names shortlisted for the Deutsche Börse photography prize (DBP), Thomas Demand (b1964, Germany), Elad Lassry (b1977, Israel), Roe Ethridge (b1969, USA) and Jim Goldberg (b1952, USA), I decided it not to comment, because I could find little of any photographic interest in it. It seemed very much the same dog bites man story as usual, and I couldn’t even find the energy to make my usually inaccurate predictions. The only satisfactory conclusion would surely be for the award to be ‘none of the above.’ But since others seem to be stirring up a little controversy, and critic is biting critic, here’s my own pennyworth.

Photographers are selected on the basis of a particular show, and the only one of the four that I’ve seen was by Goldberg at the Photographers’ Gallery. It wasn’t a show that particularly impressed me although I think some of his work and his approach is interesting – see the essay on AIDS in India I’ve mentioned previously. And certainly there is some fine work in his Magnum portfolio. I’d even be slightly happier if the nomination had been for the book ‘Open See‘ rather than the exhibition of that work. But even if he isn’t my favourite contemporary Magnum photographer (and I’ve seen more interesting shows by other Magnum names in the past year) you still don’t get into Magnum without being a photographer with something to say.

Lassry, nominated for his exhibition ‘Elad Lassry‘ at Kunsthalle Zürich, is also one of the four artists in the MoMA show New Photography 2010 and on the basis of his work on the web is someone whose images I find intensely pointless. According to an article in Interview, “he has already been claimed as a conceptualist, a realist, a neo-Pictures Generation artist, a pop recycler, and just about every other genre that has anything to do with objects and their consumption.” I don’t find any reason to want to claim him as a photographer.

Ethridge‘s work was shown at this year’s Rencontres dArles and is also included in MoMA New Photography 2010. He takes images from magazines or the out-takes from his own commercial work and puts them into sequences. Big deal. Frankly almost as interesting as tearing up a few magazines, shuffling the pages and pinning up a few of them. According to the MoMA text “Combining and recombining already recontextualized images, Ethridge at once subverts the photographs original roles and renews their signifying possibilities.” More scrapbooking than photography.

Demand is the best-known of the four, but sees himself as a sculptor rather than a photographer, using cardboard and paper to recreate images and then photographing these as a record before destroying them. It’s something he does fantastically well, is incredibly clever but is not photography. His finely designed show (and book) Nationalgalerie combines works from the last 15 years which explore the image of Germany. Just a shame he isn’t really a photographer and the work under consideration isn’t really photography.

You can read Sean O’Hagan‘s thoughts on the current DBP in his Guardian article ‘Do the Deutsche Börse prize jury really get photography?’
and Jim Johnson has commented in that in his ‘Does Sean O’Hagan Really Get Photography?’, a response that surely doesn’t come up to his normal high standards. Also worth reading is Abigail Simon’s ‘Nothing New Under the Sun?’ about the 2010 MoMA show.

It’s worth also thinking what the DB prize is supposed to be for, awarded to “a contemporary photographer of any nationality, who has made the most significant contribution (exhibition or publication) to the medium of photography in Europe in the previous year.” I can’t think of a single award in this prize or its previous incarnation which has really been deserved on that basis, despite a few years when it has gone to those whose work I greatly admire.

As someone who has belonged to the Photographers’ Gallery since its early days I’ve over the years been reluctantly forced to the conclusion that it doesn’t much understand or care for photography, which it rather seems to hold its nose and handle with tongs while espousing what it thinks is ‘real art’. Occasionally a little slips through onto the gallery walls although you almost always find rather more in the print room and bookshop. One halfway decent photographer in four nominees is probably batting above the gallery average.

The DB seems to be a cosy curator’s club prize, an opportunity for mutual back-slapping, which I think is a great shame. It would indeed be good to have a major prize for photography in the UK, and to have a major gallery that supports photography as well as eating a large portion of the public photography budget.

Local & International

It was a bitter afternoon as a few members from the local Brixton Global Climate action group met at the recently re-landscaped Brixton Oval between the library and the Town Hall at the major road junction in the centre of the town. Where previously there had been a small oval area with grass and flowerbeds around a central tree, there is now a large, flat and rather bare expanse bordered by the busy A23, and a cold wind was making the most of sweeping across it.

It was difficult to make much of the event photographically, but although it was small and local, it was one with a global significance. The Brixton group was one of 70 around the world, but apparently the only one in the UK, to respond to a call by one of the largest organisations in the world, La Via Campesina, representing 150 million people around the world, small farmers, agricultural workers, rural women and indigenous communities around the world for ‘Thousands of Cancuns for Climate Justice‘ to mobilise grass roots solutions and actions.

I’m not sure I made a great job of it, but I did my best, and put the story on Demotix, where it also got a mention on their blog, but not a great number of readers. Putting it on My London Diary and here on >Re:PHOTO will actually attract many more views.

There on My London Diary you can also read more about the event, and the call which arose from the ‘Cochabamba People’s Agreement’ produced by the 40,000 who attended the Cochambamba People’s summit for climate justice earlier this year and was brought to Cancun by the Bolivian Government but its concrete proposals for a sustainable future rejected.

And there are a few more pictures, but I think by the time it came to break open the pink pig ‘World Bank’ piñata I was too cold to think straight and couldn’t quite get the timing right.

The Nikon autofocus system is fine for things like photographing predictably moving objects – like racing cars – but with people taking rather random hits I would have been better switching to manual focus and avoiding any time lag as the camera tried to focus. Almost every frame the actual exposure came too long after I pressed the release.

UK Uncut Pay Day

Saturday December 18th is ‘Pay Day‘, UK Uncut‘s second day of demonstrations around the country against tax dodgers, once again targeting Vodafone and Sir Philip Green, on one of the busiest shopping days, just a week before Christmas.

I’m at a meeting and then travelling across the country (snow allowing) and so won’t be photographing this event, but I have just put more pictures from their first day of action in Oxford St on December 4 on to My London Diary.

We had snow then too, and my train took an extra 25 minutes to get in to London and although I ran up and down the escalators on the Underground I still was not there in time to get inside Topshop for the start of the protest (though since I was carrying a camera bag the security there would probably have ejected me in any case.)

This was a protest that caught the attention of the media, and as well as a crowd of press and freelance photographers, there were also many others there with cameras, crowding around the door and the line of security men and police across it.

I’m not particularly tall either, which doesn’t help when you are in a crowd. The protesters were at the back of the store and I couldn’t get a good view of them. There were a lot of shoppers still inside the store at that point taking pictures of what was happening on their phones and compact cameras, and they were better placed than us.

Later it was still a huge crush whenever there was anything happening in the doorway of the shop or even on the pavement outside. But I did get some pictures that I rather liked, and in particular a whole series of one young woman.

My difficulty was that I was really too close, having to work with a wide-angle lens and sometimes getting a little more distortion than I wanted. I couldn’t move to either left or right, being pushed from both sides and from behind, as well as ignoring a policewoman who kept telling me to move back.

Later I photographed the same woman protesting outside BHS, and there both protesters and photographers had a little more room.

In some ways it’s a better picture, with some well-placed text on the two placards, but I find the upper one stronger, partly because of the closer approach (and the distortion that comes with that), partly because of the tauter expression which gives it a greater urgency. But it also works better because of the radiating light fittings above the head, and, perhaps most importantly because the text in the image is more importantly placed and also ‘TOPSHOP tax dodgers’ is rather more central to the protest than the more political slogans of the lower image.

Having arrived late and perhaps missed what might have been the most interesting part of the protest I was pleased to find that at least one of my images did appear in the press.

It was that pointing finger, accusing Sir Philip that made this the picture to be used, and this was the ninth of a dozen frames I took of her pointing, some including more people. Three frames used a similar framing to this image, but in the other two the finger stands out less as rather than being over the red background, it is over the face of the man behind.

For this I was using the D300 with the 28-105 Nikon at 57mm focal length. The top image was on the D700, 16-35mm Nikon at 26mm, and the middle picture the D300 at 67mm. All at ISO 800 to give me decently fast shutter speeds. It was an overcast day but but not too gloomy and I didn’t use flash in any of the pictures, though I have opened up the shadows and brought down some of the highlights in the processing in Lightroom.

Students – Day 2

The second of the series of student demonstrations organised by the National Campaign against Fees and Cuts took place on November 30th, and they had a further demonstration on December 9th, which I also photographed and posted about a few days ago.

The next big student demonstration will be towards the end of January, because Parliament has a longish break over Christmas, as do many students. But another person or group, rumoured to have links with the EDL, has set up a Facebook page for a ‘fake’ demonstration on Monday 20 Dec, presumably with the intention of in some way discrediting students, perhaps hoping for some kind of violence. It’s one I won’t photograph even though some people may turn up.

© 2010, Peter Marshall
A police medic holds a protester with his left hand and takes a swing at him with his right while friends try to pull him away

The second day of action started in Trafalgar Square but did not develop as expected. Rather than a short march down Whitehall to Parliament Square and then on for a further protest outside the Lib-Dem headquarters, over half of the demonstrators decided to head off early, were blocked by the police and then commenced a ten mile fast march around much of central London, before returning to Trafalgar Square.

It was a peaceful march by the students though I witnessed one small attack by a police officer on an individual student and another use of what seemed rather unnecessary force to stop a group of the marchers taking a short cut. There were a couple of fireworks thrown – one exploding at my feet, and a few snowballs mainly aimed at the police.

The marchers got lost in the maze of back streets around St Bartholomew’s hospital in the City – and there wasn’t even a policeman there too ask the way, as the City of London police either hadn’t noticed the demonstration or had decided to stay out of its way, at least of the half hour in spent on their patch before I gave up and caught a bus.

The protesters were convinced the police were trying to kettle them, but so far as I could see they made no effort to do so until very much later in the day, following a certain amount of pushing and shoving in Trafalgar Square when most of the protesters had already gone home – and I too left before they imposed a kettle.

© 2010, Peter Marshall
Just beyond the banner some students were trying to push through the police line. Others were simply walking out one of the the other entrances to the square which was still open.

It was a chaotic event, and the accounts on sites of some of the left-wing organisations differ dramatically from mine. I think you do get a fairly good idea of what went on from my description and pictures on My London Diary, though of course it wasn’t possible for me to be everywhere and see everything.

Climate Change

Yesterday I went to Shepperton for a carol service in the shade of the reservoir next to the studios, and then on to dinner a few yards down the road. Several times during the evening I thought of Shepperton’s most famous twentieth century resident, the late J G Ballard, and wondering how his dystopian vision could fit into this rather cosy corner of suburbia.

I particularly thought of his vision of a flooded world, and of the perils of global warming and the failure of will of almost every nation around the world to get to grips with the issue at Cancun. The notable exception was Bolivia, and at the annual Campaign Against Climate Change march and rally a few days earlier I had photographed Maria Souviron, the Bolivian Ambassador to the UK, speaking.

At Cancun we saw an agreement, but it was very much an agreement for the richer countries to continue more or less business as normal, and one that even were its best hopes realised would still produce an unacceptable climate warming. It was an agreement to lift the foot off the accelerator slightly when what is urgently needed is a change to reverse gear.

De-growth isn’t really a word in English, and certainly not an idea in conventional economic thinking, but an idea that we need to embrace for our civilisation to have more than a very limited future.

I’ve photographed these annual marches and other demonstrations by the Campaign Against Climate Change since they began – and then I was still using film and mainly black and white. And although I could very much sympathise with Caroline Lucas when she said she hoped we wouldn’t need to be here again next year, I also felt it was both highly unlikely that our Lib-Con government was going to completely change its spots and make our protest unnecessary – and that it is an event I’m always keen to photograph.

I was glad I wasn’t the official photographer in Hyde Park, perched up in a cherry picker what seemed a very long way above the crowd lining the numbers 2030 in Hyde Park – the date that the protest was calling for Britain to be a zero carbon country. There is a long history of such overhead shots, and they do still sometimes attract the attention of the media, though personally I find them very boring. It looked very chilly up there and I don’t have a great head for heights, and would have been shaking from both fright and cold.

I’m pleased too that I can’t see myself in the official photo, though I was certainly there somewhere, taking pictures while standing in one of the lines while the others were waving towards the camera.

You can just make out a pink pixel where these guys were jumping up, and though you can see the white suits of the group below, the pants don’t appear to be visible.

Of course there were also more – and often rather better opportunities for pictures while the march was forming up and also during the march, and you could actually read the text on the banners and placards.

And while it was just possible to recognize from some of the distant buildings on the horizon that the ‘2030’ image was taken in London, it was just a little more obvious in some of the pictures I took later!

And although Caroline Lucas was apparently not well, she spoke as powerfully as ever and if anything looked healthier than usual while she did so.

It was a cold and overcast day, and I was generally able to work without flash, but by the time it came for the rally at the end of the march it was beginning to get a little dark, and I needed to use flash. I was standing fairly close to the speakers who were a couple of feet higher on a platform, which was covered with a fairly white roof. The struts you can see are a little ugly, but otherwise it wasn’t a bad background, and I was able to get some bounce from the front of it by aiming the SB800 flash on camera up at 45 degrees.

Later they added a powerful light low down in front of the speakers, giving them a rather ghoulish appearance as well as some nasty shadows from the microphone and stands. Using flash again helped, as well as providing much better colour rendition than this continuous light.