>Re:PHOTO Peter Marshall - Thoughts on Photography

Flattry, Theiving and Photojournalism

The Russian Photos Blog by Jeremy Nicholl has an interesting post today And Now For Something Completely Different: Is Photojournalism Dead Yet? relating back to Neil Burgess’s pronouncement of the death of photojournalism made on the EPUK web site and discussed here two weeks ago in Funeral For Photojournalism?

Hardly had the ink dried on Burgess’s piece at EPUK than exactly the same piece appeared on another web site, lifted completely without permission and promoted by this site as their own piece (and apparently they are so proud of it that they’ve made over a hundred tweets about it.) As well as the text they have also reused the accompanying photograph by David Hoffman, along with his copyright notice.

EPUK not surprisingly are upset and have passed the matter to their “lawyers who will be looking for proportionately substantial damages, an apology and an immediate takedown.”

The organisation concerned is the London Photographic Association (LPA) which “is a trading identity of London Photographic Awards Limited” which started in 1997, as an annual competition with a “coffee table catalogue”. LPA Membership costs £125 a year (less for overseas members and students.) When I was writing professionally about photography I used to get press releases about the LPA and its competitions, but they never convinced me that it was something I should write about.

Nicholl picks up a few other contributions to the debate over the future of photojournalism, and ends with the conclusion that although these have some different perspectives, one thing they have in common is that they are not by working photographers, and that “it might be more appropriate to talk to the monkeys than the organ grinders.”

Well, he could perhaps have done just that, but it seems to me he has chosen not to do so. One very positive contribution to the debate comes from VII photographer Tomas van Houtryve (which I first read about on dvaphoto last week) but is covered by a post on Tomas’s own blog, Testing new funding models for photojournalism.

I’ve often mentioned the need for some working micro-payment model for the web, hoping that something could emerge that worked by a levy on the payments we all make for internet access and be distributed on the basis of page hits in some way, rather like the current DACS system for copyright payments for photocopying of images in UK newspapers and books. (I filled in this year’s claim and sent it off on Saturday.)

But Flattr, which van Houtryve is implementing on his web sites, is a voluntary subscription scheme that would appear to overcome many of the problems both of implementing the kind of cumbersome official scheme I’ve envisaged, and better still, one that is already working, if only just now released into open beta.

To join Flattr you have to engage to pay a fixed monthly amount to cover all web pages that you want to reward for their content that month – I understand the minimum monthly amount is 2 euros, though to save administration costs you have to sign up and pay up front for a minimum period which makes it worth transferring the cash.

Once joined, you can reward web sites you like that carry a Flattr button by clicking on it – you Flattr them. Every month your monthly amount is divided equally among the sites you have clicked (and Flattr of course takes its tithe) and credited to their Flattr accounts.

As a content provider you collect up the payments from the clicks and when it’s reached a sensible amount can transfer it to your Paypal account. It really does seem to get round most if not all of the problems currently associated with ‘Donate’ buttons or other ways of generating income from simple web sites.

But. And it’s quite a big but. There are obvious advantages for content providers in joining Flattr, and I suspect that the great majority of those with Flattr accounts at the moment are content providers, but I’m not convinced that large numbers of other internet users will be signing up for the scheme. So at least at the start its a way of distributing small amounts of money between creators. Though I think many of us would like at times to have some way of thanking people for their work which we’ve found useful or entertaining, will that translate into actually committing an annual amount to do so?

It might, and perhaps it’s worth a try. But I think it really needs the support of rather larger players in the internet league than Flattr. And its perhaps something that the links between these guys and Pirate Bay, and also the support that it is giving to Wikileaks may not help. But as that article at TechCrunch Europe (link to http://eu.techcrunch.com/2010/08/02/wikileaks-will-fund-itself-via-flattr-pirate-bay-founders-startup/ removed as my antivirus now reports a problem) points out, one of the companies backing it is Clerkenwell’s White Bear Yard, whose previous successes include Skype.

Dvaphoto also mentions Kickstarter, which offers an alternative method of attracting funding for creative projects. At the moment a US bank account and address are required to start a project and receive funds, but the scheme enables you to advertise projects and also offer inducements (for example a photographer might offer a book or a signed print from the project) to those who agree to give financial support. The money – typically $15-$100 from each donor – doesn’t change hands unless the total needed for the project is pledged, and each project has a time limit to try and attract funds, with Kickstart taking 5%.

Still Occupied

I’ve just started work on scanning another of my early projects, really the first organised and extensive work I produced, on the urban development of Hull , or, to give its proper title, Kingston upon Hull.

I just walked into the city art gallery there one day with a small packet of prints and asked to see one of the curators. She obviously wasn’t expecting anything like I’d brought, took a brief look and then asked me to come back with more work at a later date. I think it’s still true that outside of London people are much more open and prepared to look at new work, and that was certainly the case in Hull at that time.

The prints I had made were quite small – around 5×7 inches, very sharp and printed rather intensely using Agfa Record Rapid – my favourite printing paper and something of a legend. I’d started using Agfa Portriga – a warm tone paper – a few years earlier, because it was being sold off cheaply after Agfa had stopped importing their black and white papers in the the UK and had been impressed. Then somehow – perhaps a note in a magazine or by word of mouth – that Peter Goldfield had set up a small company called Goldfinger to import another and even better Agfa paper, the more neutral Record Rapid, into the UK.

Muswell Hill was somewhere in London and I was soon catching a train and the underground and then walking up the long hill from Highgate tube station only to find that the address I had was a chemist’s shop rather than a photo store. Evemtually I decided to go in and ask, having come so far, and was told that I had indeed come to the right place and was taken to a door around the side of the shop where stairs led to a photographic Alladdin’s cave.

In there I met two fellow enthusiasts, Peter Goldfield and Martin Read, both of whom I got to know over many visits. Peter who was my age and I was to get to know better through workshops – at first when he gave me a lift up to the Photographers Place in Bradbourne to see Lewis Baltz and later at the workshops that he set up and ran at Duckspool – sadly died last year. Martin had long continued the photographic business on his own as Silverprint – it celebrated 25 years in 2009 – a short walk from Waterloo station south of the river. It’s still the place to get the best of materials for black and white photography though it now also offers a wider range of products and services. And from the web site you can still download a pdf of the original ‘Goldfinger Craftbook‘ which when published in 1978 became the second essential piece of reading for any photographer wanting to produce fine prints (the first was of course the Ansel Adams Basic Photo volume, ‘The Print.’)

The show ‘Still Occupied – A View of Hull‘ took up the whole of the top floor of the gallery in 1983. I’d originally intended to show around 80 black and white prints, but by the time it came to hang, the number had grown rather and I’d also added some colour work, and I think the final total was just under 150.

This year’s show will be rather smaller, as I’m limited to an 8 foot by 4 foot panel. In the original show the 7×5″ prints were arranged in groups of 2 or 4, and were mounted behind specially cut window mats. This time I’m thinking of using a similar layout but simply printing the 2 or 4 images onto the same sheet of inkjet paper and showing them unmatted.

Although the show won’t have so many pictures, I’m also hoping to make another Blurb book, which may well contain thumbnails of most or all of them with a smaller and tighter edit of full page images. But I’ll also be making a slightly different selection the second time round and the picture above is an example. In the original show I used a vertical image which included the doorway and the war memorial to its left, and also the whole of the window above. Now I think the car with its broken headlamp and the shop window with its boxes of ‘Tide’ and other detergents has a stronger message.

There are a few more pictures from this project on the Urban Landscapes web site.

Gloomy Day

Two bits of news have made today a gloomy one for at least some photographers. Particularly depressing for those staff photographers working for the Daily and Sunday Mirror. A post on Press Gazette states that six of the ten staff photographers working for the two titles are to lose their jobs. After the cuts each paper will have just two staff photographers. Only a few years ago even a small local paper would have as many if not more. The other Mirror Group national, The People, already runs without a single staff photographer.

Of course the papers still use photographs, but most of these will probably come from the mega-agencies and be increasingly generic images. Increasingly there are more and more freelances around chasing fewer and fewer sales opportunities. Bad news for all of us.

The other bit of gloom will only really affect those few photographers still using Fuji Sensia film. The BJP reports that all production of these ISO 100, 200 & 400 transparency films has stopped, although current stocks are expected to last until December. It won’t affect many because they’ve only stopped making it because sales are too small. Provia and Velvia remain in production.

I gave up using slide film (except when a client insisted on it) around 1985, when it seemed to me that colour negative film enabled me to produce better results. In the BJP article, Jonathan Eastland says he came to the same decision last year, when Kodak brought out its new Ektar 100, which has finer grain and more latitude than any reversal emulsion. More or less the same reasons that drove me to the same conclusion 24 years earlier, although since we now all work with scanned images, the fact that it is far easier to get good scans from negative is also vital.

Transparency film was kept going in professional use for many years largely because editors could easily assess images on a light-box and repro technicians couldn’t be bothered to set up scanners for negative film. Once we started scanning our own and submitting digital files we could all see the advantages of negative.

Then of course came digital. And by the time we had 6Mp cameras like the Nikon D100 film of all types had really lost the battle for most purposes.

Lightroom 3.2 RC

No, you haven’t missed anything, they skipped 3.1 in order to align the fractional release numbers with Lightroom and Camera Raw (for which 6.2RC is available) which makes sense. Details and download link on Lightroom Journal

Great news for me is among quite a few added lens profiles is one for the Nikon 16-35mm, and there are a couple of others, along with lots more for Canon and Pentax and also profiles for some Zeiss lenses on both Canon and Nikon. And if anyone has managed to afford a Leica S2 they will be pleased too, along with owners of a number of more lowly cameras. They also hope to have more cameras and lenses in the final version of LR 3.2.

Also there is a pretty good long list of bug fixes. If you don’t have one of the cameras or lenses for which support has been added, it’s probably worth checking through this to see if it solves any of your problems. Although there are a few things that look as if they may help me a little, they haven’t tackled any of those things I find most annoying – like ‘Export’ giving lousy soft and over-large file size small jpegs. So I’ll continue to have to use the web module when I want to make the 600x400pixel images, then copy these out of the website created before deleting the hundreds of files I didn’t want.

One little bug fix that should help me is:

Develop: The local adjustment brush could have a very slow first stroke when exposure is the selected adjustment

Fortunately the catalogue format hasn’t been changed so there is less likelihood of installing 3.2RC causing any problems. But overall if you haven’t had any of the problems that are fixed in the list and if you don’t have any of the cameras and lenses for which support has been added there isn’t any point in downloading the release candidate – wait for the final release.

Otherwise, I’ve just begun my download and you should be after me in the queue to get it.

Press Pass or Not?

Controversy rages currently between the long-established professional media organisations and upstart Demotix over the decision by the latter company to issue photographers with its own ‘press pass’. Since 1992 there has been a voluntary UK Press Card scheme, organised by an independent authority which licences 16 national organisations which represent journalists and other media personnel working “professionally as a media worker who needs to identify himself or herself in public” and entitles them to issue a ‘UK Press Card‘ formally recognised by all police forces in the UK (the scheme was launched by the Met) and many other bodies.

In general it has been a good scheme that has benefited photographers, police and public, although it hasn’t always given us the cooperation with the police that it supposedly entitles us to, and even some high-ranking officers have sometimes shown an abysmal ignorance about it.

But I’m certainly very much in favour of the UK Press Card scheme, which has generally worked well, and in which I have a certain interest having carried a card for many years, at first from the PPA and latterly from the NUJ. Its major use for me has been to reassure members of the public who I am photographing, and if they have any concerns it provides a means that they can check on me through the police via the verification hot line whose number is given on the card. So far they haven’t bothered to do so – looking at the card has been enough.

It does also occasionally get me into areas which are closed from the public at some events, as well as free entry to some exhibitions etc. This has been a privilege I’ve always been careful not to abuse, only using it when I was actually writing or photographing the events concerned, although some colleagues and other card-carriers are considerably less scrupulous. Over the years some or most of the 16 “gatekeepers” have issued this card to many whose work can in no way justify it (a suggestion that many will admit in private but attack anyone who mentions it in public.)

Although I carry the card all the time when I’m taking pictures, at probably 95% of events I photograph it stays in my pocket. Usually if you look as if you know what you are doing and behave sensibly you can work without problems. The other 5% of times – mainly dealing with police or when I’m photographing events involving children – it does become useful or essential and without it I couldn’t work effectively.

Demotix wasn’t around in 1992 and doesn’t I think belong to any of the associations involved in the UK scheme, although it could possibly join at least one of them. I first came across their card a few months back, before they began to issue them more widely, when I saw one hanging around the neck of a colleague when we were covering the same event in Trafalgar Square, and asked him about it.

Like it or not, our industry – if that’s the word for it – is changing, and like many others involved in it he simply does not earn enough from it as a proportion of his earnings to qualify to join the NUJ. To keep up his professional media work (and his work is professional) he has to do other things that make more money as well.

The same is true of many others who put work on Demotix, where you can often see journalistic work of a very high standard from the UK and countries around the world – overall a considerably better standard of work than in many newspapers and in particular recent issues of the NUJ’s own magazine.

Again I have to declare an interest as I often post work on Demotix, largely because it enables me to tell my stories at some length and depth to an audience. On Demotix I can write a story – perhaps 500 or a thousand words and upload it with 15-25 pictures to form a slide show and have it available on-line in less than an hour from when I’ve finished it. A very high proportion of those that I post become ‘front page’ stories promoted by Demotix and seen by a decent number of people. Though still considerably fewer than see them on My London Diary or in posts here.

The only really unfortunate thing about Demotix is that sales are low, and I make very little money from it. I keep hoping things will change. I actually started with them following a suggestion on how photographers could look at new ways to make a living from photography made at an NUJ photographers’ conference, but it hasn’t so far worked out.

The statement that appears on the NUJ site warning about the Demotix press pass is unfortunately a very poor piece of journalism, getting too many of the facts wrong, particularly in the headlines. Demotix isn’t “selling” its ‘press passes’ and it isn’t an “amateur journalists website”. As Demotix CEO Turi Munthe stated to Journalism.co.uk,”The vast majority of Demotix’ regular contributors are pro or semi-pro photojournalists around the world, whose work has appeared in every major news outlet in the UK.”

It’s important also to remember that although the NUJ piece treats it as if it was entirely a UK matter, Demotix has photographers around the world in 190 countries sending it stories, including some that have no proper press card scheme.

I haven’t got a Demotix card but if I didn’t have a UK Press Card I would apply to Demotix for one. Before the UK Scheme I worked using cards provided by several bodies both from the UK and one USA company, all of which had my name and photograph, the name of the organisation I was working for, an expiry date and a contact phone number that could be used to check up on me. I cam see no problem with any organisation issuing members with such an identity card so long as they control it properly. It does really simply show that the person holding it is working gathering news for Demotix.

Although the Demotix card has been stated to look rather like the UK Press card, it would be hard for anyone familiar with that to be misled. What perhaps makes it contentious is the large black text PRESS on a yellow background similar to that on a UK Press card, but at around twice the size.

I’ve not checked recently, but it used to be possible for those who met the Demotix criterion of ‘ten published stories’ on the site to download a free PDF to make into their Demotix card, although there were many requests for Demotix to have them produced professionally and made available at low cost to those who qualify, and that seems now to have been done. This isn’t “selling” them any more than the annual fee I used to pay for my UK Press card from the PPA was.

I’d like Demotix to have greater quality control generally; stories are currently vetted by editors at least until photographers establish themselves as reliable, and most contributions do reach a reasonable standard. Perhaps 10 published stories is setting the bar a little too low, and they should consider only issuing them to photographers who have published at least this number and had at least one making the ‘front page.’

But I’m not entirely happy with the UK Press Card scheme either, and not just because some people who never emerge from an office get one. Although at the moment we seem – thanks to a lot of work by the NUJ in particular – to be getting the police who backed it in the first place to recognise it, there are still far too many other places where it isn’t recognised, with people – often I think thorough ignorance of the scheme – demanding their own accreditation. If the scheme were more generally known and accepted and the card recognised there would be considerably less danger of people being confused by a company card such as the Demotix example.

But underlying all of this dispute is the fact that the UK Press Card scheme is based on the status quo of 1992 in an industry that has changed considerably in those 18 years. The scheme and the NUJ too has failed in some respects to keep up with this changing nature and in particular the huge change from staff to freelance work. Many freelances have to combine various skills – and not all necessarily in journalism – to earn a living. The union should be much more actively promoting professionalism in journalistic work not just in the traditional media but also in blogging and various other on-line manifestations of the new journalism which include companies like Demotix.

We perhaps too need to concentrate more on audience than on earnings when assessing who should qualify for a press pass. Last October my page views for all my web sites for the month were over 250,000 for the first time and are now consistently around that level, and this site reached the 100,000 mark in June and is still increasing. Thanks to all of you for reading this but this site currently makes me no income. To me it’s still journalism, just the same as when I was writing and photographing and getting paid for it (and fortunately elsewhere this just occasionally still happens.)

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I’m still wondering whether I should add a donations button to these posts, or even possibly move to another platform where I could add some fairly unobtrusive advertising. But I’d prefer not to.

You can however support me in other ways. First and most easily simply by recommending the site, telling your mates, writing about it and linking to it if you have a blog or web site or use Twitter or Facebook etc. If you have any connection with using or commissioning photographs then all my work on all of my sites is available as high res for repro, and I’m generally available for work in the London, UK area. And of course you can buy prints of anything on the site at fairly reasonable prices as these things go – both older black and white work such as my Paris Pictures (that page has a link to sales and information on the bottom) or any more recent work.

Finally I’ll mention Blurb books – and I’ve a new one coming shortly when I’ll mention them again. I don’t make a great deal on these, as I’ve kept the markup very low since Blurb isn’t cheap, and my motivation wasn’t to make money but make my work available to anyone interested. Currently two very different books are available:

Before the Olympics:
The Lea Valley 1981-2010
Peter Marshall
Softcover UK £16.45

Over 240 images from the Lea Valley in an 80 page book, including many from the area now redeveloped for the London 2012 Olympics.

and

1989
Peter Marshall
Softcover UK £10.95

20 lack and white photographs from 1989 and accompanying text from an imaginary diary of a walk in north London with a famous deceased author.

The links lead to pages with previews of each work – and where you can also order them.
Post and packing is extra.

Christians Protest Pakistan Oppression

What do you do when you turn up to photograph a protest where you’ve been told there will be several hundred people and you get there at the stated starting time to find around three people there?

Its actually three more than at one event I went to photograph earlier in the year, which was a total no show. Usually I’ve got the phone number of an organiser or organisation, but too often I find I’ve left these at home when I go out to take pictures. I’ve been meaning for a while to get either a net-book computer that I’ll take everywhere or at least a rather smarter phone than my present mobile and to start organising my photography on a portable device, but at the moment everything lives on a largish tower system next to my ‘desk’ (actually a rather crude table made from a door in the house we decided we didn’t need that I designed and made one afternoon around 15 years ago having found that something the size and solidity I wanted would cost several hundred pounds.)

Having been disappointed a few times by activists who get ideas for protests but don’t do anything to actually organise them, I do now try to check up on events before adding them to my diary. Sometimes just on the web, other times by contacting other people.

On Saturday there were just a handful of people setting up for a demonstration by the British Pakistani Christian Association outside the Pakistan High Commission, but obviously they were expecting more people. The event had been timed to start at 11.00, with a minute by minute programme planned with various speakers, prayers, songs etc, but nothing was happening when I arrived a couple of minutes later.

Often, particularly when other photographers are present, this is an opportunity for a coffee in a nearby cafe or something stronger in a pub. I always try and carry a book with me, both to read on the train on my way to events and also to fill in time when I’m waiting for things to happen. And if I’m in the right place I’ll visit an exhibition – in Trafalgar Square often in the National Gallery which has a fantastic permanent collection on display, or the National Portrait Gallery.

There isn’t a lot to do at Lowndes Square. I did take a short walk – there were a few things around I wanted to check up on – then sat on a wall opposite the protest and read. Fortunately there were a few more people around by 11.35 when the event actually started. Even then I didn’t find a great deal to photograph, although there were moments.

One picture that I didn’t quite get came when a deputation took a petition to the Pakistan High Commission. One man came out onto the steps to meet them and a took a few pictures and then saw a second man looking through the glass of the door. Unfortunately I didn’t think to zoom as far as I could with the 18-125mm I had on the camera (I was working with just the D300) and by the time I’d though about it he had opened the door and come out too.

Not a great picture, and certainly it would have benefited from greater depth of field

particularly in the cropped version below.

The march from Lowndes Square to Downing St started around 12.20 and having followed for the first couple of hundred yards I decided I had done enough. Sometimes I walk all the way with marches, but often I get too tired and although the backgrounds may change essentially you are working with the same elements. If you’ve got 10,000 people they may be quite a lot to photograph, but with 50 people it’s hard to avoid repeating yourself after a few minutes.

So I went and had my lunch – sandwiches – in Hyde Park (and read a little more of that book) before catching a bus to Trafalgar Square. I’d hoped to catch up the marchers at Piccadilly Circus, and kept a watch out for them from the top deck of the bus, but traffic holdups meant I just missed them there. Large demonstrations play havoc with the roads in London, but police were taking this one along the pavement and it should have caused little delay. I could have got there quicker on the tube or by bike if I’d brought one with me – or had joined the mayor’s bike scheme which launched the previous day.

This march was a little different to most, making three stops for prayers en route, and I photographed the last one in Whitehall shortly before it reached Downing St. Here there were more speakers (including former bishop Michael Nazir Ali and London Green MEP Jean Lambert) and also a singer, as well as quite a few more people waiting to take part, so more things to photograph.

More pictures and the story about this protest on My London Diary.

Hiroshima 65 Years On

At 8.15 am Hiroshima time on 6 August 1945 the bomb called “Little Boy” was released from the B29 named “Enola Gay” after the pilot’s mother and around 45 seconds later its 60 kilograms of uranium-235 detonated around 1900 ft above the city.

Several years recently I’ve attended the annual memorial event at Tavistock Square in central London, but this year I didn’t make it. You can see a report on last year’s event on My London Diary. I hope to get to the exhibition After the Bomb Dropped: How Hiroshima and Nagasaki Suffered which is now showing at the Friends Meeting House on Euston Road until August 12.

I don’t know which photographs the show will contain. The only photographer known to have photographed in Hiroshima on the day the bomb dropped was Yoshito Matsushige (1913-2005) a 32 year-old photographer for the Chugoku Newspaper in 1945, and you can read his testimony in English online. He was eating breakfast without his shirt on at his home, 2.7 km away from the centre of the blast when them bomb exploded. He saw “the world around me turned bright white.” Then came the blast, which felt like hundreds of needles stabbing into his bare torso, blowing holes in the wall and ceiling, filling the room with dust.

Matsushige pulled his camera and clothes from a mound of dust and went out on the streets. War-time shortages meant he had only two rolls of 120 film for his camera. He soon came on victims, school kids with terrible burn blisters, but though he picked up his camera he couldn’t bear to press the shutter. It took him 20 minutes to get courage to take one shot, then he moved to take a second. He walked all around the central area where the damage was at its worst, finding many terrible scenes, including a bus full of 15-20 naked dead bodies, people whose clothes had been stripped away by the blast that killed them, but was unable to bring himself to take the picture. As a newspaper photographer he also knew that pictures showing corpses could not at that time be published.

In all he managed to force himself to take just a handful of images, seven in all, of which only five came out, so stunned was he by the horror of the scenes he saw. He found himself unable to photograph the screaming and suffering victims face on; he could only make himself photograph them from the back, and even then it was hard to know that he was unable to help them. He reports that there were other photographers in Hiroshima that day, both at his newspaper and army photographers, but none of them were able to take pictures. He is the only photographer known to have photographed Hiroshima that day.

Three days later on August 9 a second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. Yosuke Yamahata was sent by the Japanese Army News and Information Bureau to photograph the city as soon as the news came through, but transport was so badly disrupted that he was unable to reach it until the following day. He published a book of his pictures, Nagasaki Journey, in 1996 (the review by David L. Jacobs looks more generally at pictures of the dead), and you can also see his pictures and read his testimony at the Exploratorium site.

Keep It Clean

The anti-capitalist protest following the decision by the Director of Public Prosecution Keir Starmer not to prosecute the police officer recorded on video assaulting Ian Tomlinson minutes before the death of this previously fit and healthy man, not a demonstrator but simply on his way home from work, was bound to be an angry one. As expected that anger on this occasion, which included several periods of silence in Tomlinson’s memory, was confined to words, both spoken and on some of the banners and placards.

The decision wasn’t unexpected, which makes it even more shocking. Our political establishment couldn’t let it go to trial because it seemed inconceivable that any jury would fail to convict. Like in the more than a thousand cases of death in police custody since 1969 there would be some kind of cover up, though this was more obvious than most. Not one single police officer has been charged with either manslaughter or murder in even one of these cases. Of course not every single one of these largely unexplained deaths were caused by illegal actions by police, but it is hard to dismiss the evidence that many if not most were.

The police cover up, they lie to support each other. They use pathologists (as in the Tomlinson case) who are known to be incompetent. Above all they hold things up so that lesser charges can no longer be brought and memories fade.

If the boot had been on the other foot (or rather the baton in the other hand) we would have seen the case in court within days and a verdict within a few months. Instead, the case of Ian Tomlinson has taken more than 15 months to come to a decision not to prosecute. Even that is fast – the family of Sean Rigg whose sister spoke at the event are still waiting for the inquest result two years after his unexplained death minutes after being taken in to Brixton police station.

So anger isn’t surprising. What is surprising is that so many seem satisfied to put up with the situation without doing anything about it. Perhaps the fact that most of the victims are black and most are working class comes into it.

Photographically one problem was that the anger expressed itself very obviously in the language on some of the banners. Not a problem in some ways, but it can make the publication of images difficult.

In the above picture the banner was not quite fully visible and could read ‘FOLK THE LAW NOT THE POOR’ but in most other images it was less equivocal! At least one other banner included another word not generally used in polite company, and had I been videoing the event the sound track would also have presented problems, particularly during the march.

The above picture also shows another problem I had, related to fingermarks on the lens and shooting as I was with the sun not far out of image, there is a kind of diffuse arc over a part of the building just left of centre towards the top of the image. Unfortunately it wasn’t really visible on the camera back unless I zoomed in, and I didn’t notice it until later.

The other aspect of the banners that worried me slightly was the possibility of defamation, as some quite clearly called a named office a murderer. However given the circumstances it is hard to imagine any possible case being taken over this.

But perhaps rather unusually I should give a warning that the pictures from this event on My London Diary may contain language that some may find objectionable, though in my opinion considerably less objectionable than the decision by Keir Starmer.

Avatar, Vedanta and Bianca

Celebrity and the entertainment industry don’t enter greatly into my photography, but I suppose they have their uses in promoting some causes, and certainly the two guys in blue with pointy ears did make for some fairly striking images. I was pleased too that Survival International had yellow placards to contrast well with them, and the protest was about a tribe, the Dongria, in Orissa, India, whose whole future is threatened by the destruction of their ancestral lands by UK company Vedanta mining and smelting bauxite, so their presence seemed appropriate.

What I like about this image is that by some careful positioning and framing I was able to exactly encapsulate things in the frame as I wanted them. I didn’t pose anything at all (and I wouldn’t) but the expressions and the directions of gaze on the two women’s faces could I think not be better. It’s not a great photograph, but somehow I find it a very efficient one.

Of course I photographed the other protesters and other aspects of the event, a picket outside the AGM of the company, which receives considerable support in various ways from UK government agencies despite its poor record on human rights.

and you can see more of the pictures as usual on My London Diary.

The protest was organised by a number of organisations including several fairly large charities, and a number of their supporters had bought single shares so they could attend the AGM. Bianca Jagger was attending the AGM on behalf of Action Aid (as she did last year) to “take a message from Indias threatened Kondh people direct to shareholders” and there was a certain amount of media interest because of this. It wasn’t easy to come up with a decent picture of her – she didn’t seem particularly to want to be photographed, and the best I think that I made was after the few seconds of a rather uninspiring “photo-opportunity” as she went up the steps.

Too Big, Too Small, Just Right

It wasn’t the story of Goldilocks, but the size of stones to be used to hurl at the victim sentenced to stoning under Sharia Law in Iran. Men to be stoned are buried to the waist before the executioners – mainly prison guards start to hurl the stones with all their might, while women are buried to the neck. If the stones are too small, they will injure but not kill. If the stones are too large they might kill the victim immediately. They need to be just right, so that the victims keep alive to suffer for perhaps twenty minutes as they are reduced to a bloody pulp by stone after stone.

The sentence passed on Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani for her alleged adultery has shocked the world, thanks to her lawyer, Mohammad Mostafaei and the groups that have campaigned on her behalf, and the outcry has been so great that Iranian sources have stated she will not be stoned, but is expected to be hanged. Hanging in Iran is still a barbaric practice, with the person struggling for breath for many minutes hanging with the noose around their neck, as they are slowly strangled by the weight of their body.

Mostafaei fled Iran after he was questioned and released, but heard that police had already arrested his wife and her brother and were about to arrest him. He has now applied for asylum in Turkey.

Sakine was initially tried and found guilty of having an “illicit relationship” with two men after the murder of her husband, on the basis of a ‘confession’ extracted under duress and which she has since retracted. Sentence of 99 lashes was carried out for that offence in 2006, but the courts also decided to reopen her case and charge her with adultery, finding her guilty on a majority verdict apparently based on a judge’s opinion of her rather than any evidence.

Of course hers is not an isolated case, and at least 12 and possibly as many as 50 others are in prison in Iran awaiting stoning. The death penalty there under the Iranian interpretation of sharia law applies to murder, rape, armed robbery, apostasy (the abandonment of Islam) and drug trafficking as well as adultery.

© 2010, Peter Marshall
Maryam Namazie speaking
It was hard to find any way to express an appropriate disgust while photographing, and for me at least, the simple image of the stones was most effective. Of course I also photographed the event in Trafalgar Square – people standing with placards, including a small group wearing coloured full body (Zentai) suits who came and joined in briefly, the speakers and a little bit of street theatre, though I’d wandered away briefly when this started and missed the key element!

More about the Day of Protest Against Stoning on My London Diary.