>Re:PHOTO Peter Marshall - Thoughts on Photography

Chinatown Celebrations

I’m not sure when I first went to Soho to celebrate the Chinese New Year, but the first pictures I’ve been able to find are from 1998, when I took pictures in both black and white and colour.

It’s quite likely to have been my first visit there, as for the previous ten years or so I was spending most of my time photographing the buildings of London, and the relatively rare days of good light during the winter were especially important in visiting some of the more suburban and leafier areas of the capital, which in spring and summer get hidden by a screen of green leaves.

In summer too the sun is higher in the sky and often the lighting is less interesting for these pictures – although I tried to avoid pictures that were just about lighting.

So in those years my photographs of events were largely around those in the summer and the warmer weather does seem to make people more outgoing.

Not that I gave up my pictures of London buildings for summer, but tended to work more in the central areas where trees were less of a problem. And there were more days where the weather was favourable.

If you want to see what the web looked like in 1996, the site I built then with some of these London Photos is still on line (I added some pictures the following year and sorted out the code a little later when HTML and browser changes made it necessary, but essentially it remains a vintage 1996 web site.)

© 1995, Peter Marshall
This Victorian pub in Barking with a splendid frontage closed on 11 Oct 2009
when landlords Rita & John retired and Youngs sold it. Photo August 1995.
© 2006 Peter Marshall
And the pub much the same in 2006 – though the area around it had changed.
More pictures from Barking and the River Roding in 2006

The scans I made then sometimes look rather poor now – they include some excellent examples of moire and have a rather ‘dotty’ effect. Scanners have improved and software too, but the big difference is in download speeds. The 466px by 303px jpeg above was trimmed down in size to 34Kb but still took a few seconds to load. Nowadays I’d happily make it 80Kb and it would load in a fraction of the time.

Most years since 1998 I’ve gone back to photograph Chinese New Year and the celebrations had a considerable growth when Ken Livingstone was Mayor. Chinatown was crowded in 1998, but now an even larger area of central London heaves with people making movement difficult.

But my main reason for not going today isn’t the crowds but that the pictures that I’ve taken more recently seem just to repeat those I’ve taken in earlier years. As I wrote last year (and illustrated with a few pictures)

Its certainly a spectacle worth seeing, but Ive seen it before and photographed it many times and dont feel a need to repeat the experience.

So I’ll spend the day at home, making some new black and white prints of old work and perhaps on the several web sites I’ve been promising to update for some years.

Street Party

I often think London serves its tourists rather badly so far as it’s well-known landmarks are concerned, and as it happens I was taking pictures in three of them on the same day, Trafalgar Square, Parliament Square and Piccadilly Circus.

Trafalgar Square was improved greatly when the north side of it was closed to traffic, and at least makes a try with the column, lions and fountains, and the National Gallery along the whole of its north side is an impressive building (though its new block is uninspiring – thanks to Prince Charles we didn’t get a “monstrous carbuncle” that by now we would admire and love, but instead later got the unusually timid and rather bland post-modern Sainsbury Wing by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown. The square’s south end is still a traffic scheme, with poor old Charles isolated on his horse, and again St Martins to the east is on the other side of a busy road. It’s an area that cries out for a more radical approach, particularly to traffic movement.

Parliament Square is frankly ridiculous. Traffic flows around all four sides and there is not even a crossing for pedestrians to get to the central area – you need to study the traffic lights and take your chances when they stop the cars. Understandably one of the constraints on the area is the need for security, but rather than ugly tank defences above ground we could have some nice landscaping – perhaps even a moat… And of course redirect traffic around the east and north side only, with proper pedestrian crossings.

But Piccadilly Circus is just a mess. A rather shabby pedestrian area around Eros, and its main feature a wall of advertising, but again traffic is the real problem, and the congestion charge doesn’t seem to have helped much. Perhaps one problem is that it is a flat rate charge, and that once you’ve paid it for the day it acts as an incentive to drive around more. Perhaps road pricing that charged for the actual time spent on the road would be more efficient – and have a built in incentive to avoid congested areas.

I don’t have a lot to write about last week’s Valentine Party at Piccadilly Circus. Of course as well as photographing the people involved I wanted to show where it was happening, and make use of that aluminium statue (after all Eros was particularly relevant to an event about love) and also all that neon – as it was an event opposing commercialisation.

© 2010, Peter Marshall
Historic Annual Earth Healing Circle at Piccadilly Circus
This year’s party was perhaps too popular, making it too crowded for there to be a great deal of dancing, and also often too crowded to take pictures. The 12-24mm did come in handy, though as usual it was often just a bit too wide. But I enjoyed taking pictures and meeting people. More about the event and a ridiculous number of pictures on My London Diary.

Iran Opposition

Last Saturday’s Iranian demonstration in Parliament Square was in several ways an easy event to photograph, not least since the organisers were very keen to have the press take pictures and had organised the event in a way that made it easy for us to work.

Working in Parliament Square gives you a very obvious way of showing where you are in your pictures, with the gothic clock-tower of Big Ben instantly recognisable around the world. I’ve taken many images with it in over the years, sometimes having to perform some fairly extreme contortions to do so, but here it was easy to satisfy my desire to include it in some images.

Most of the pictures were taken on a Nikon D300 with the Nikon 18-200mm lens, (27-300 equivalent) and it was a pleasure to be working with this again and not to have to change lenses to zoom in to a tight head shot. I really do prefer the D700, but lenses for that are rather more conservative in zoom range (and considerably more expensive.) I was using the D700 for the more extreme wide-angle view, with the Sigma 12-24mm. Its a nice lens, and still going strong after six years of my normal abuse; though it did need a facelift when the front element got a few small craters in it – the element is too bulbous to allow you to protect it with a filter.

The 12-24 is a very useful lens on DX format – where it becomes equivalent to 18-36mm, but on full frame it is just a bit too extreme at the wide end. The distortion at 12mm is almost always a noticeable problem, and I really need to avoid the last few mm of focal length. So it’s useful zoom range is really only something like 16-24mm. I hope soon to replace this by Nikon’s latest 16-35/4 VR zoom – supposedly available here from Feb 19, though I don’t know yet when my dealer will get supplies.

Given the 1.5x factor with the DX format it really makes more sense to use this with longer lenses. If Sigma manage to sort out my 24-70mm that would become a 36-105 equivalent on the DX body, useful whenever I need it’s f2.8 aperture, but otherwise the 18-200 is just so versatile.

Back to the demo – as usual more about it and more pictures on My London Diary – in the end it’s people that make pictures interesting for me, and sometimes it’s just a matter of expression and fitting them in to the overall picture. But who could fail with this face?

Although getting the right combination with the placard of Maryam Radjavi did take a little bit of doing – and this was probably about my twentieth attempt.

Here’s a slightly less obvious picture of Big Ben, along with some street theatre the protest organisers had laid on for the press.

This was quite tricky to photograph, mainly because a dozen or more photographers and a couple of guys with video cameras were also trying to get the same picture. You have to learn to pick the right place, get there before the rest and stay there until you are sure you have your picture. Sometimes in situations like this the very wide angle of the 12-24 does come in handy, because if you move back with a longer lens someone is almost bound to jump in front of you.

Oily Olympics

The start of the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics provided a great opportunity for protesters against the Canadian Tar Sands and they took it. Trafalgar Square was celebrating the event with a giant screen and an ice sculpture and I think they had hoped this would attract the crowds. Unfortunately it didn’t.

But at least the Canadian Tar Sands Oil-ympics provided an hour or so of interest, next to Canada House – and you can see the pictures I took of the events and the medal ceremony on My London Diary, along with a little more about why people are protesting against the tar sands – and the companies who hope to profit from this environmentally disastrous project.

‘Shell’ get off to a good start in the relay

Perhaps it was rather better as an idea than in the actual execution and I found it hard to produce pictures that really satisfied me. Perhaps it didn’t help that the 24-70mm I’ve mainly been working with recently was in for repair (again after a couple of weeks.)

One of the first things I photographed seriously was sports, though I soon got bored with it.

A couple of the canoeing images I took around 35 years ago now did quite well at the time. The only reason I took them was really that I’d just bought a new lens, one of the first of a new generation of zoom lenses, a Tamron 70-220mm Adaptall, introduced in 1973.

As well as the novelty of the zoom (really only common on movie and TV cameras before – I’d used one working in the educational TV studio where I really started learning practically about photography a few years earlier – these lenses also incorporated a rather clever idea that in theory enabled you to use the same lens on cameras with different mounts. The lens came with its own mount, and you then bayoneted a slim adaptor on to that suit the camera you were using. Lenses were rather simpler things then, and apart from actually holding the lens in place, the only other linkage that cameras provided was a mechanical one, indicating the lens maximum aperture and stopping it down to the taking aperture when you pressed the shutter release.

It wasn’t a really bad lens, but unlike now, there was still a considerable gap in optical quality between prime lenses and zooms such as this, and after a year or two I sold this lens second-hand and bought a couple of superb primes (a 105mm and 200mm) that actually together weighed slightly less than the zoom. I think it was almost 20 years before I bought another zoom lens. Now I take perhaps 95% of my pictures on zooms.

More on Copyright

I’ve long been a fan of the Photo Attorney blog by US attorney Carolyn E. Wright, which recently celebrated five years on line – though if you have an old bookmark you should to update as it is now at a new address. (I think all the links I made to the old site still work.) She gives some great advice on legal matters for photographers, much of which is relevant to those of us outside the USA too. Occasionally her site has been the first place where I’ve read about some of the problems photographers have had here in the UK too.

A week ago Wright made a great post on another blog I look at regularly, A Photo Editor, in an article Photographers- How To Deal With Infringements and one of the benefits of not mentioning it here immediately is that this has now attracted quite a number of interesting and informed comments. Her piece has some useful advice on making use of the DMCA (the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act, 1998) as well as the advice “If you created the photo in a country that is a signatory to the Berne Convention, you do not have to register in the U.S. to protect your copyright or to file an infringement lawsuit in the U.S. However, if you do, then you may be entitled to statutory damages and attorneys fees” which perhaps makes the situation clearer than some other sources (Though one of the comments asks the very good question why, since the US is a signatory, you need to register photos taken there. There’s signing and there’s signing!)

But her piece very clearly lays out a series of steps photographers can consider and take to try and recover fees for the use of their work. However much of this may soon be history so far as UK photographers are concerned, with the Digital Economy Bill now making its way through Parliament. As mentioned here before, this law is Mandelson’s baby part dictated to him in a Corfu villa by David Geffen and is expected to be passed within the next month or two and, as the Copyright Action web site puts it:

“It introduces orphan works usage rights, which – unless amended, which HMG says it will not – will allow the commercial use of any photograph whose author cannot be identified through a suitably negligent search. That is potentially about 90% of the photos on the internet.

“Copyright in photos is essentially going to cease to exist…”

On that site you can read and download a letter to post to your MP, preferably with your own comments, but otherwise as it stands (download links are in 3 formats at the bottom of the letter.) If you are a photographer or a lover of photography and a UK voter please consider doing so – and don’t leave it, do it now. I’m getting mine ready to send now.

Private in Public

Last Friday lunchtime I was photographing a demonstration in the City of London, in front of a large modern office building close to Liverpool St station. The building houses UBS, a Swiss-based company formed by the 1998 merger of the Union Bank of Switzerland and the Swiss Bank Corporation, the second-largest manager of private wealth assets in the world and the second largest bank in Europe according to Wikipedia.

It’s also a company that is trying to bolster its reputation following a continuing investigation into dodgy off-shore accounts designed to fool the US tax authorities, and last month it issued a new code of conduct and business ethics which all employees are required to sign. Apparently the new interest in ethical conduct doesn’t apply to its own relations with cleaners, and it handed over the cleaning contract to a new company, Lancaster, on Feb 1. They immediately cut the cleaners hours – and thus their pay – and sacked the union shop steward, Alberto Durango.

The UBS offices have a wide pavement area in front of them, generally walked across by the public but actually owned by UBS – the kind of privately owned public space that makes up large areas of our cities now. UBS is on the southern edge of the large Broadgate estate which is one such area, developed on the former site of Broad St station (which was of course part of the publicly owned British Rail before it was sold off.) The public are freely allowed onto such areas as consumers to visit and consume the services of the various companies that occupy them, but we are not allowed the freedoms that we normally enjoy on the public highway – such as free speech and taking photographs.

To me this is reflects a deficiency in our planning processes – which should insist on such pavements being a part of the public highway as a condition of planning consent and also possibly of our laws about what is and is not public space. Photographers recently demonstrated at Canary Wharf against the restrictions on photographing there – another large private estate on formerly public owned land.

So I wasn’t at all surprised after I took this picture

that the security guard at the left – his boss is the guy with the umbrella talking to some of the demonstrators telling them they can’t demonstrate there – came up and told me I was not allowed to take photographs. And of course when I asked him why this was, his reply was totally predictable. “Security, this is a bank” he told me. “But I’m pointing my camera away from the bank” I replied, “so how is security involved?” His answer was to tell me that if I continued to take pictures there he would call the police and ask them to remove me, although he did also tell me that I could photograph from the pavement by the side of the road – which would of course mean that I was actually photographing the bank. Somehow that wasn’t a problem.

Of course it isn’t really about security at all. It’s about asserting the rights of the property owner, and also on this occasion about the embarrassment of the company at having a demonstration about the truly abysmal way they are treating their cleaning staff.

What I think is more serious about this is that within a few minutes the police did arrive, not to deal with me, though several times officers did politely tell me to move back onto the public pavement when I strayed on to the private forecourt, but to force the protesters to move off of private land. I fail to see that a peaceful protest on private land that is causing no damage, is of limited duration and no threat to public order should be of any concern to the police. It seems to me to be essentially a civil matter rather than a criminal one, and that the police force have rather more important things that should occupy them.

I’d be very much happier with a police force that acted to protect the rights of workers.

More pictures from the event on My London Diary.

World Press Photo

I can’t understand why so many blogs publish a small selection of the winning images from World Press Photo and don’t write anything about the images they use. Just what is the point, when at the click of a mouse you can go and see the whole of the work of the winners? Online at World Press Photo.

I’ve only had a quick glance through the whole lot of them – there are quite a few – and don’t really want to say anything about them yet, other than an overall impression, which is that I think they show that 2010 was a disappointing year for photography. Of course there are exceptions – and the set of pictures by Eugene Richards is one.

Of course, as two well-regarded photographers were saying to me today, World Press Photo is very much a lottery (and one went on to suggest perhaps even more so because the judging is held in Amsterdam, and at the end of a day looking at far too many pictures the judges may well indulge in recreational activities that could well cloud their judgement.)

Among the outstanding work there do seem to me to be some rather pedestrian images, and while in recent years there have been some surprisingly interesting pictures or sets in some of the generally more tedious categories such as sport, arts and entertainment and nature, this trend seems to have reversed somewhat. Perhaps too the portraits fail to excite me this time.

I’m not a great believer in contests and competitions. I seldom enter them and am unconvinced they generally improve the general standard of photography not least because I suspect the best work very seldom wins. Partly because selection is often a matter of political trading between the various judges (as we occasionally hear when judges spill the beans after the event) but also because at least in some competitions the judges often include people in whose judgement I have little or no faith. Not purely out of prejudice, though probably I’ve plenty of that, but because of the visual quality of magazines they edit or exhibitions they have curated etc.

Certainly the most interesting comment on last year’s World Press Photo was UNCONCERNED BUT NOT INDIFFERENT by Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin who were among the judges. I first read this in Foto8, but it seems no longer to be available on their site but can be downloaded from the authors’ Chopped Liver web site – listed under Information / Selected Articles. Worth reading after you’ve looked at the pictures.

2010 Deutsche Börse Photography Prize

This evening I went to the opening of the showing fo the four photographers short-listed for this year’s Deutsche Börse Prize at the Photographer’s Gallery in London and was disappointed. Although in previous years I’ve usually disagreed with the decision of the judges in making the award, I think this year is the first in which I’ve found little or nothing among the work displayed really worth looking at.

I’m particularly disappointed because one of those short-listed was a photographer who I knew years ago in the 1980s and whose work I then admired. Back then I was involved with a small group of photographers who called themselves Framework and met monthly to look at each other’s current work, and occasionally organised group shows. The core of the group apart from myself was Terry King, who did most of the organising, and others involved included Carol Hudson, Derek Ridgers and Jim Barron. (You can read more about this group in an old and outdated but never finished web site.) We had our first exhibition as Framework in 1986 and the last in 1992, and the full list of those who showed with us included some well-known names in UK photography, including Jo Spence.

One of the photographers who brought her work to several of our meetings in Kew was Anna Fox, and I was greatly impressed by her pictures of office workers in London, later published as ‘Workstations‘ (1988). When she came to Framework she had I think just finished her degree studies at Farnham, where she is now Professor of Photography at University for the Creative Arts. I think she was also the only photographer we invited to show with Framework who declined to do so!

So I went to the gallery tonight rather rooting for Anna (though we’ve not kept in touch) but found myself rather disappointed by what I saw on the wall. You can see quite a lot of it on her web site. The series I found most interesting was her 1999 miniature bookwork ‘My Mother’s Cupboards‘, but it was simply too small and in a way too limited. The selection from ‘Back to the Village‘ was also rather disappointing, and in general I felt that what we were seeing in the gallery was too many little bits and nothing really substantial. And looking through her web site, I still find the work from her early projects – particularly ‘Workstations’ – rather more exciting than anything she has since produced. You can read about her work ( and the other three) in The Telegraph.

I can’t even bring myself to write anything about the actual work by Sophie Ristelhueber which is on the ground floor of the gallery. Other than that the prints are quite large. But on my last visit to Paris I saw shows by twenty or more French photographers who I find of more interest, and I find it hard to see why her work made it here. There is a gallery of her work from her Jeu de Paume show on The Guardian web site which I find rather better than looking at the gallery wall, but still fails to convince me the hype is really more than hype. And I’m not sure why the Photographers Gallery should be showing the work of someone who says ‘Nowadays I am not even a photographer because I am a conceptual artist.’

Zoe Leonard is a photographer whose work I’ve known for a long time and probably first saw in the American photography magazines, perhaps Modern Photo. I’ve always thought of her as a pretty good photographer, but nothing really special, and the work on show confirms this. Analogue 1998-2007, on show at the gallery, isn’t a bad piece of work, but I think there is very little to distinguish it above the work of the many other photographers who have also photographed “tacky shop windows, quaint signage and mundane commercial products“. I can’t really say anything against it. There are quite a few images I’d have been happy to take myself when I worked extensively with similar subject matter in London twenty years ago. But I didn’t take them on square format and print the film borders.

Duncan Wylie’s work on the Maze prison after closure I’ve always found rather boring, and this show did nothing to change my mind. The article in The Telegraph is considerably more interesting – and the smaller selection of images helps greatly in this.

But the prize winner in this show must surely be the original producer of the scrapbook which fills one wall, I think Wylie’s uncle, although it was published by Wylie and Timothy Prus. The selection of spreads on the Steidl page is misleading, because the major interest lies not in the photographs but in drawings and the text of the articles, from magazines and newspapers – and also a typed ‘recipe’ for the troubles.

It’s these articles and (and that the wine ran out almost before the opening started) that stick in my memory and created the greatest impact – not the photographs, and that seems to be a fairly damning indictment of what was meant to be a photography show.

Bow Creek By Bike

I was on my way to Stratford to be interviewed and decided on the way to visit the section of path by Bow Creek to the south of Bromley by Bow. This is an isolated section of path tidied up and opened some time ago that somehow I’ve never quite managed to go along before. If you are on foot it’s a bit of a pain, because having walked around 2/3 of a mile you come to a dead end and all you can do is turn round and walk back.

But it was a decent enough day for a bike ride, so I took the Brompton up to Waterloo on the train and down the escalator then hopped on it on Waterloo Rd. Cycling in central London is really rather easy compared to the suburbs where I live, because there the traffic tends to be moving around 30mph faster than me, whereas most of the time in London it’s going at the same speed or slower.

First I revisited The Gas Light and Coke Company’s War Memorial, which is close to the start of the footpath. I photographed it a few years ago, but since I was there thought I’d do so again. I rather admire the statue of the boss, Sir Corbet Woodall, one of the great figures in the gas industry whose attitude to his workers – who he made partners – was remarkably enlightened by today’s often primitive standards. He looks the part too, standing there with his spectacles in his hands. Although he died during the ‘Great War’ he was 75, so I don’t think his death was attributable to enemy action, but many of his employees did die fighting for their country, and their names are listed on the panels in the memorial.

The footpath is wide and has a good surface for cycling, and in the hour or so I was there taking pictures I saw only two people who had come down it for a walk. But it’s a pleasant detour if you are in the area.

I was using the Sigma 24-70 and working mainly on manual settings with the lens well stopped down – mainly around f8, as I wanted to make some panoramas by stitching images. Since almost all the interest is along a fairly narrow strip there doesn’t seem to be much point in producing the kind of all-round views that would have acres of sky (and a lot of path) in them so I was making single-row panoramas, which it is fairly easy to do hand-held. Thought it would have been slightly better to have used a good tripod – there were a couple of pans I tried that won’t stitch well enough for me.

I tried a few 360 degree panoramas, but apart from getting very long and thin, I usually find I lose interest somewhere. Probably the best pictures come from around the 100-120 degrees that I used to get in a single exposure on film with swing lens cameras like the Horizon.

You can see more pictures from the Gas War Memorial and the path on My London Diary – where I give some more information about the walk. I’ve also posted 3 of the panoramas I made on a special page. The top one is a bit less than 180 degrees and almost fits my screen if I browse maximised. The second is less ambitious and around the aspect ratio I normally prefer, though I don’t find this particular picture as interesting as the other two. And the third is a full 360 degrees. To see all of that at one time I need to press Ctrl and – together a couple of times to zoom out in Firefox. And contrary to the end, this is the picture I like best.

Prescott Folly?

This is not yet another underhand knocking piece about our former Deputy Prime Minister who I think has been so unfairly pilloried by the press, largely because of his adherence to his working class origins and some habits which are rather too easy to make fun of, not least a complete inability to construct a coherent sentence, always jumping off to another thought before reaching a conclusion. But I really think Prescott deserves praise as the first UK politician in power to take environmental issues at all seriously.

But so far as I know he played no part in the creation of the Prescott Folly, officially known as ‘The Three Mills Lock‘ and a part of the “greenwash” around our 2012 Olympic Games bid. The lock was to enable huge amounts of building materials and waste to be transferred in and out of the Stratford site over the river/canal system already existing there, but previously only navigable by small craft around high tide. Actually even although the new lock will keep up water levels above it, there isn’t a great deal downstream at low tide, so I’m not sure what a great difference there will be.

The Prescott Channel, named after a long-forgotten chair of the Lee Conservancy Board, was constructed in the 1930s as a part of a flood prevention scheme, which also involved the construction of several new locks designed for navigation but which were seldom if ever used.

2010 sees history repeating, as although a barge was loaded with waste in June to take to Rainham for disposal I suspect this was a photo-op rather than the start of real operations and there seems to be little use currently being made of this £19 million lock. The barge for those pictures on the Waterworks River is the 250 tonne Ursula Katherine from Bennett’s Barges. The only pictures of a barge I’ve found elsewhere on the system, apart from a few narrow boats (and they used to occasionally make it before the lock was built) are all of the single barge from the opening event – and I’ve even searched Flickr.

The Olympic Development Authority already claims to be more than meeting its target for movement by rail and water using rail alone. So they don’t need the barges. But it would be nice to see one going through now and then.

But even though it is perhaps unlikely to have much of a role in the concretisation of the area taking place for the Olympics, the lock does have two roles which will be critically important in the aftermath, when property developers will be scrabbling for easy profits. It will enable the flows of sewage that occur into the Lower Lea during storms to be prevented from flowing upstream on the tide into the Olympic area, and will also prevent the flooding that can currently occur on much riverside land.

Which is of course good news for British Waterways as it converts considerable areas of riverside land that they own from open wasteland into highly desirable development opportunities. But had they proposed the plan for this reason it seems unlikely it would ever have been started. Folly is hardly the word to describe it; deception would be more accurate.

I had been hoping to cycle on the footpath along the side of the river along the ‘Long Wall’ from Three Mills to the new lock, and then to continue over the bridge at the lock and on to the Northern Outfall Sewer. Both paths were closed, supposedly for six months, for the construction of the lock. The lock was completed months ago, but the paths remain closed.

You can see more pictures of the lock and the area around on My London Diary.