>Re:PHOTO Peter Marshall - Thoughts on Photography

Join CREEP

Colin Jacobson in a interesting post about World Press Photo (I found it interesting, which means he expresses rather more eloquently some of the things I thought about it – as well as a few more novel ideas) in his first contribution to his MOG (Miserable Old Git) blog, invites us to join CREEP, the campaign for the eradication of repetitive photojournalism (not quite an acronym more an anagram with an added ‘e’) whose mission is to “to encourage contemporary photojournalists to pledge to avoid predictable visual situations” (actually Jacobson calls it a “mission statement” but that’s a term I’m already determined should be wholly wiped off the face of the planet. Unless you are David Livingstone.)

And he starts a nice list of subjects that should be banned, inviting readers to add their own visual subject matter that should be added to the embargo. As he ends by saying, “This could all get quite enjoyable.”

PDN Top 30 for 2010

It’s always interesting to look at PDN‘s ‘Top Thirty‘, the annual choice of new and emerging photographers to watch made with the help of a number of industry figures, and this year’s crop is I think a good one. As usual there are a few names I already recognise among them, but mostly they are new to me. And most of them have work that I find interesting, and I’ll go back later and have a look through their portfolios – so far I’ve just clicked through to see the 3 pictures per photographer in the Flash presentation and read the brief biographies there.

This is the list of this year’s Top 30:

Levi Brown

Alejandro Cartagena

Scott Conarroe

Sumit Dayal

Clémence de Limburg

Gratiane de Moustier

Danfung Dennis

Lauren Dukoff

Matt Eich

Matthieu Gafsou

Marcelo Gomes

Deborah Hamon

Estelle Hanania

Ben Hoffmann

Sohrab Hura

Wayne Lawrence

Brent Lewin

Eman Mohammed

Adrian Mueller

Nick Onken

Alex Prager

Thomas Prior

Ben Roberts

Anna Skladmann

Andy Spyra

Gabriele Stabile

Peter van Agtmael

Elizabeth Weinberg

Yang Yi

Reed Young

You can still see the work from earlier years, including 2009 and also 2008 when I think they presented it rather better. Nice to have a list of photographers down the side of the page. And interesting to read them and reflect that the only ones I recognise now are probably the same ones I recognised when I first saw this list two years ago.

2007 is here and you can also access this and earlier years via the archive page, which conveniently also lists the winners from 1999-2007. Interesting to read through and find how many names are now familiar.

Crown Court Demo

Last Friday morning was a little disconcerting as I found myself walking up a road that I’ve not visited for many years, but first walked up in the mid 1950s, in short trousers and with a new blazer that was a little too big to give room for growth and satchel. I didn’t quite get as far as my old school at the top of the hill, though I saw it a little ahead as I turned off at the building before it, Isleworth Crown Court, a new building since my young days.

I wasn’t going to court but to photograph a demonstration outside it, where young Muslim boys and men who had been picked out from CCTV coverage of the demonstrations in January 2009 during the Israeli attacks on Gaza were being sentenced.

Before their trials the judge had told them he’d already viewed the evidence and advised them to plead guilty. I didn’t think this was how we usually did justice in our courts, and certainly at least one defendant who went against this advice later left the court an innocent man. But most decided to plead guilty, doubtless being advised that this would result in a lesser sentence.

But the opposite appears to be true. The judge made clear in at least some of his judgements that he was very much intending to make an example of these people aimed at their community. Actions that at other times might have been expected to lead to a smallish fine or suspended sentence led to jail sentences of a year or even two.

Protesters see the trials and sentencing as both racist and an attempt to suppress legitimate expression of protest as well as unjust. The effects on the young men unfortunate enough to have been identified from the camera footage (mainly because, unlike many more seasoned demonstrators, they had not thought to keep their faces masked) are clearly disproportionate to their actions. Collectively they seem certain to fuel terrorism in this country, their severity and unfairness acting as effective recruitment for dissident groups. I can only hope – though it doesn’t seem likely – that their will be some review and serious reduction in these sentences after the judge has done his worst.

Stop the War had called an emergency picket of the court at relatively short notice, and probably few people know where Isleworth is or find it easy to get there early on a Friday morning (though its only 35 minutes on the Piccadilly line from the centre of London – and a ten minute walk.) So I was really quite surprised to find around 15 people there when I arrived – and about the same number again arrived while I was there.

Photographing around courts can be a problem, and we were told we had to move away when we tried to take pictures of a couple of women with placards just in front of the court entrance. The protesters too had to move just a few yards away on the pathway leading from the small car park at the front of the building. But otherwise the police were helpful, even moving their car out of the park to give the protest more space.

This was my first outing with the new Nikon 16-35mm f4 lens. I’ve been using the Sigma 12-24 as my main wide-angle on the D700, and although it works well on the DX format D300, with the full frame it is just a bit extreme. Very few pictures really work at 12mm, and although I seldom notice the stretching at the edges that results from its rectilinear design in the viewfinder, they are only too obvious when I see the image on my computer screen or in print.

Using the physics and geometry I learnt many years ago just a hundred yards or so up the road from the court, while the distance from the the centre of a simple 12mm lens to the sensor is – for a subject at infinity – 12mm, the distance from that same lens centre to the corner of the frame is 24.6mm, giving roughly twice the magnification. Hardly surprising it is noticeable, as the maths also applies to the much more complex arrangement of glass in a photographic lens. The horizontal angle of view of the lens at 12mm is around 112 degrees, and anything over 90 degrees really calls for a different perspective except in very special cases. On full-frame anything below around 17mm is seldom much use.

Nikon used to make a 17-35mmf2.8, and it was a good lens for film and for DX Cameras, but they discontinued it a while back, though it is still listed on the Nikon UK site. It was also rather large and heavy, and still sells second-hand for around a grand. With their FX camera they brought out a larger, heavier and more expensive 14-24mm f2.8, which seems a very good lens but has a bulbous front element that you can’t put a filter on for protection. It is faster and doubtless sharper than the 12-24mm Sigma I’ve used for around six years, but considerably larger and heavier, and given a choice I’d buy the Sigma again. It does the job and the D700 (or D3s) takes away much of the need for fast lenses.

But when Nikon announced their new AF-S NIKKOR 16-35mm f/4G ED VR it seemed to me to be an ideal lens for FX, although the various boards across the Internet were full of photographers who strongly and vituperatively felt otherwise. My only disappointment was that it was quite so large and heavy – around the same size and almost as heavy as the 17-35 f2.8 – in part perhaps because of digital favouring a design that gives rays more perpendicular to the sensor, and in part because it includes VR – Nikon’s Vibration Reduction II system.

I’m not sure that I need VR. In practice I haven’t found it seems to make much difference to my picutres even on the 18-200 zoom where I’d expect it to be most valuable at the long end. But it doesn’t seem to do any harm – most of my pictures were sharp before and they are still sharp now. But I think it does more for test exposures than in anger, though perhaps it will help in those situations where people are pushing me while I’m taking pictures.

VR also puts up the price of lenses, though I think I got a pretty decent deal considering I got the lens the day after it was launched for a price that was in three figures ( just.) Focus is really fast and everything seems pretty sharp – usable wide open though just a little better at f5.6, but the difference isn’t big in practice. The corners seem pretty sharp, there is a little chromatic aberration which is readily corrected in Lightroom, and distortion seems reasonably low, though I’d want to correct it for architectural work – not quite as good as my old 12-24 Sigma in this respect. And it does feel like a lens built for pro use, unlike many cheaper Nikon lenses which clearly are not, although in true Nikon fashion, the lens hood can rather easily get knocked off. It’s one area where Sigma are clearly superior.

So once I get the Sigma 24-70 back from repair (soon please – its been almost a month away now – and get it right this time), I’ll be putting this on the D300 body, where it works like a 36-105. Or for for those days when I feel I might need something longer I’ll use the Nikon 18-200 (27-300) on the D300.

Photographing the Pope etc

Yesterday on Radio 4’s Front Row (its close to the start of this audio clip) I heard a ten minute interview with Lord Snowdon, born in 1930 and still working approaching his 80th birthday next Sunday. Although it’s customary in some photographic circles to knock him – and he was certainly born with a silver spoon in his mouth – I think it’s hard to look at some of the pictures, particularly his earlier work, and not be impressed.

My favourite book of his work continues to be his 1958 ‘London’, published when he was still just Tony Armstrong Jones and could write “I use a very small camera, little apparatus, and no artificial lighting at all” and got himself into the soul of London. After that there were still some good pictures but perhaps his mind was on other things. In the interview he mentions two photographers who he admires, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Irving Penn, and the influence of both men is fairly obvious in particular pictures. It was Penn that for me ruined his vision, but then I’m not a Penn fan (though I admire his technique.) If you are a fan of Penn – or more open-minded than me – you can see Irving Penn – The Portraits at the National Portrait Gallery in London until 6 June 2010, and it does make you realise that Snowdon never quite managed to join the same league as the master.

But the interview with Snowdon is well worth listening to, and includes his account of the picture that got away, when he spent days in Rome trying to photograph the Pope, and when he finally did get to see the man as he emerged from a helicopter, wasted the precious seconds going down in a deep bow rather than getting on with the job, and by the time he had got up the Pope had gone.

I’ve never tried to photograph the real Pope, but the other Sunday there was a demonstration against his planned visit later in the year, with not only a ‘pope’ but also some nuns – three of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence who were rather more colourful than the real thing.

There are a few pictures I quite like from the event on My London Diary though some perhaps don’t quite come off. I liked the idea of Peter Tatchell’s megaphone speaking directly to the pontiff, but the light was fading fast and getting everything right and just the right amount of unsharpness in the robes and mitre was tricky. It didn’t help that I needed to be slightly behind Tatchell and most of the time his head was turned away and I had to wait and catch moments to get a good profile.

It took quite a lot of attempts to get a usable frame, not least because I was shooting at 1/30 s or slower with the lens at around 50mm, and some were not sharp on Tatchell’s face. As he finished talking I rather kicked myself for not increasing the ISO – a couple of stops more would have given me 1/125 and made the job much easier – and with the D700 the results would still have been fine. It’s easy to forget you can do this when the light gradually fades, one of the big advantages of digital over film.

Marcus Bleasdale – Rape of a Nation

Marcus Bleasdale‘s The Rape of a Nation on Burn is a powerful set of 25 images from the “deadliest war in the world today” taking place in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) where 5.4 million people have died since 1998. Many of the 45,000 who die each month do so from readily preventable causes due to the complete collapse of the economy and any systems of health care.

As well as the strength of the images, I was also impressed by the presentation, with an interface that really works, and where for once it makes sense to click the “full screen” icon – which gave me excellent quality sharp 1560×1050 pixel images (though the size will presumably depend on your screen.) I was able to view the pictures at my own speed with captions appearing over a small strip at the bottom of the image on mouseover and a left-click changing to the next picture, and everything worked smoothly.

This is also a site that attracts some interesting comments on the work – and where the photographer himself replies. Well worth reading, and in his replies he does provide some links to sites which supply some powerful insight into the political and economic forces behind the war which was an aspect I thought lacking in the text when I first looked at these pictures on Burn.

Tea But No Tea

In the last few days I’ve photographed a number of tea-related events, starting with a picture of my wife holding a giant plastic tea cup in front of a local church to send to the local paper as publicity for an event she’s running. Friday night I was in a church in Islington, photographing a bishop and the CEO of Traidcraft, and on Saturday afternoon in another church taking pictures of a tea party and African dance workshop. Those pictures were all for other people and will appear elsewhere, but here and on My London Diary you can see the work from a rather more spectacular event, ‘The Invasion of the Tea Ladies‘, with around 60 of them in checked pinafores and head scarves dancing around Parliament Square and in Trafalgar Square.

All of these events were part of Fairtrade Fortnight, promoting the idea of Fair Trade – of which Traidcraft was one of the pioneers in this country, although now it’s big business and in virtually all the supermarkets – and in particular trying to get us all to “Swap our Cuppa” to fairly traded tea. More about it on My London Diary too.

I was late arriving, as the first train I can get to Waterloo without paying an arm and a leg doesn’t arrive until 10.04, and the event was scheduled to start at 9.45am. My train was a little late and it’s about 1200 metres from the station so I was a little out of breath when I got there at 10.14, lifted my camera to my eye, pressed the button and nothing happened.

Nothing. I couldn’t understand why. Battery OK, card formatted and empty, everything switched on. I had a new lens on the camera and was worried it might be a problem with that, so I changed it. Still nothing when I pressed the button, and I was getting a little desperate. But fortunately I’d brought two bodies, so as I couldn’t get the D700 to take pictures I started to work with the D300, and every time I had a moment to spare tried to work out what was wrong with the other camera.

I tried taking out the battery, and replacing it. Tried a new battery. Looked through the menus. But every time I had just a few seconds before the tea-ladies caught my attention again and I wanted to take more pictures. The whole business was a bit more complicated because I can’t actually see the menus or markings on the camera properly without my glasses on, and I photograph without them, at around the limit of the dioptre correction on the eyepiece. So to look at the camera I had to take out my glasses, put them on, then I’d have to take them off and put them away to take pictures.

It was a bit more than a quarter of an hour later, when the demonstrators halted briefly halfway up Whitehall that I noticed that I had actually recorded some pictures on the card – random shots of the pavement, and then a few minutes later when they stopped again that I realised what the problem was when I noticed a small light flashing on the front of the body after I’d tried to take a picture again. The camera was in self-timer mode. It’s something I’ve never used on these cameras and I had no idea how to turn it off or on, though it was a relief as I’d begun to anticipate a large repair bill.

I carry the small quick start booklets for the two cameras in my camera bag – not the full manuals which are rather thick, so I took a look through that, but couldn’t find anything. Then I took a good look at all the knobs and buttons on the camera, and eventually recognised the symbol for it on a dial surrounding what on an old-fashioned camera would have been the rewind knob. It’s not a dial I use much, but also switches between the high and low continuous shooting ranges. Once in a blue moon I do switch to the higher rate, but otherwise the camera is permanently on the lower, when I can usually manage to take a single exposure by taking my finger off the release fairly quickly, or hold it down to get 3 fps. It’s also where you switch to live view – which again I don’t. Very sensibly Nikon has made it with a button you have to press down to allow the dial to turn.

I know the camera wasn’t on that setting when I put it into the camera bag. So somehow in transit or taking it out of the bag the button got pushed at the same time as something knocked against the dial and turned it. It is a very unlikely event, but it happened. If it ever happens again I’ll realise what it is rather faster.

Unfortunately in my desperate attempts to get the camera to come back to life, I’d tried a ‘reset’ using the two green labelled buttons. I should have known it never works, but just loses all your carefully stored settings. Most of them I remembered to set back the the normal values I use in the custom settings. But I’d forgotten that it also returns the camera to what Nikon think the default value for the ‘Quality’ should be. Unfortunately its about the last one that anybody sensible would use, a relatively low quality jpeg. So although I was taking pictures and they are not a complete disaster, they do serve as a very good reminder why you should always always always record images as RAW files. Tweak as much as you like and many of the pictures still have areas of empty black and harsh tones compared to the exposures made as RAW in the D300.

And although there were 60 tea ladies, there was no tea to be had.

The New BJP

I was rather sad when I heard a few weeks ago that the British Journal of Photography (BJP) intended to cease weekly publication and become a monthly magazine after so many years.

Wednesday is a day I normally set aside for tidying up things, doing a little shopping, visiting the library and my pharmacist and other odd jobs that cant be avoided – unless there is something happening I think is really worth photographing. It seems things seldom happen on Wednesdays, and part of the routine of my life was to pick up the latest BJP from the doormat and sit down for lunch with it open on the table as I ate. Normally I would finish all I needed to read in it while having a boiled egg, a couple of slices of bread and a piece of cake, though just occasionally there would be a longer article I felt was worth reading in detail later.

No longer. The BJP will come just once a month, and will be rather thicker. The first monthly issue (since the 1860s or so) arrived this morning (it should be in the newsagents in a few days time) and my immediate impression was disappointment. Frankly the cover looks confused, messy and dated and the design inside didn’t immediately appeal. Even the typeface is annoying, profusely dotted with little squiggly ligatures that make reading for me a tiring business. To be a success in the new format it needs to sell off the shelf in the newsagents, and given the price I think it will need a redesign to do so.

The BJP has never quite seemed a professional magazine, but when I started reading it you could forgive it because the people who wrote for it were clearly professional so far as photography was concerned. In more recent years it seems to have passed into the hands of journalists who occasionally seem a little lacking so far as photography is concerned, although some at least of the contributors clearly know their stuff.

They were occasionally especially fine appreciations of the work of some photographers. Sometimes there were some good pieces on technical aspects, and at times reviews of equipment by people who had actually used it in anger and could give valuable insights into its strengths and deficiencies in practical situations which some of us found valuable, even if they lacked the facts and figures of the better technical reviews (such as those that used to appear in some US magazines or those now on Digital Photography Review.)

Of course there were also other ‘reviews’ that appeared to be written from the press releases and some that would never have survived peer review, or had perhaps been slipped in while the editor was napping. The sloppiness continues. In this issue we get a piece that starts by naming an exhibition that took place 35 years ago as one that many photographers would consider the most important in the last quarter century. Well, perhaps there are many innumerate photographers!

I’ve not really read thoroughly yet, but my initial impressions, having leafed through it and read the odd piece that looked of interest are not positive, and I’m not sure I’ll find the time to go back for more. There is what looks like a decent piece on Don McCullin, but although I’m a great fan of most of his photography (spare me the landscapes) I was tempted to say ‘again.’ And there is another piece on an internationally known photographer who certainly ranks high in my list of the top ten most boring well-known photographers, but someone must like.

There is one new section – Projects – which looks to have some purchase, but at the moment it seems far too cramped. Perhaps the space for each project could be doubled in future issues? Reproduction of images one of the advantages listed for the change – is generally better than in the weekly, but usually in the past it was adequate for purpose, and even now it is certainly no ‘Aperture.’ Decent but not outstanding, I cant see it being good enough to persuade people to buy the magazine.

Overall I think the magazine seems a mess, without the fairly clear structure the weekly magazine used to have, rather as if it has grown out of control. But this was an issue produced while they were still bringing out the weekly, so perhaps this is understandable and we can hope it will improve. It would surely have been better to leave a week or two longer gap to produce the new issue so it could really have been well prepared.

I’ll get the next few issues – at least until my subscription runs out – but it doesn’t at the moment seem to have found its new place and format. I subscribe to a number of photo magazines including several more expensive than this, but each has a clearly defined character that this seems to lack.

One thing I certainly miss which was probably the most valuable single feature of the BJP for me was it’s ‘On Show‘, a listing of photographic shows around the country. The current magazine seems only to mention a couple of shows in London (one of which also has a full page advert) and nothing elsewhere in England, although for the moment at least On Show is still available on line.

On Show claims it “keeps you up to date on what is being exhibited in photography galleries across the UK. It is the one stop guide for showings in the next few months” but neither it, nor so far as I can see the magazine appears to have any mention at all of what is certainly the most interesting photographic show in London at the moment. Where Three Dreams Cross continues at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London (Aldgate East or Aldgate tube) until 11 April 2010 . But that’s the BJP for you, never quite professional.

The BJP has been a part of my life for longer than I can remember and I really do hope that it will continue. I’m sorry they felt it had to change to a monthly, but I sincerely wish it well for the future. I’m sad it hasn’t made a better start to its new era.

Critical Mass

Critical Mass is not just for cyclists.

“Critical Mass is a program about exposure and community” says Photolucida, an arts non-profit based in Portland, Oregon, USA which runs this competitive programme. It’s a fairly simple and not too expensive way to try to get your work seen by a lot of people in the world of photography.

The initial stage costs $75 and gets your 10 submitted images seen by a group of around 20-25 jurors, many connected with Photolucida and Portland which makes a selection of the top 175 from each year’s crop.

These finalists then pay another $200 and their work gets sent to a fairly impressive list of 200 jurors, mainly from the USA, but with a sprinkling from around the world. These jurors get a CD-ROM containing the pictures and “a hard-copy thumbnail image index of all the artists with contact information.”

These jurors then select their top 50 photographers, who get the opportunity to have their work in a Critical Mass Top 50 show at Photographic Center Northwest in Seattle, USA, and Photolucida will publish monographs for 2 or more photographers from among the top-scoring finalists. Their work is also shown on the Critical Mass pages on the Photolucida web site – and you can now see the 2009 Top 50 there, as well as those from the previous five years.

All entrants get copies of that year’s monographs – though they may take a couple of years to come out – as well as a CD containing all of the submitted work.

If you are thinking of entering you have a few months to get your entry ready, as registration for Critical Mass takes place in late summer. $75 isn’t a great deal of money and you are going to get two or three decent photo books in return. The publicity for the top 50 must be worth the extra $200, and the chance of publication. So if you think the world is ready for your work it is certainly worth thinking about.

Meanwhile, back in London, Critical Mass continues to happen on the last Friday evening of every month

The Future for Photography?

Last night’s meeting of the London Photographers Branch of the NUJ was an interesting one, with the union’s General Secretary Jeremy Dear asking for our thoughts about the looming threat of orphan works legislation in the Digital Economy Bill and a panel debate with Martin Argles, Kelvin Bruce and John Harris, chaired by Jess Hurd.

The two subjects are of course linked, in that the present clauses in the Bill currently being considered in Parliament very much threaten our future ability to control copyright and make a living.

One body that thinks we are making a fuss over nothing is the Intellectual Property Office (IPO) a part of the government’s Department for Business, Innovation & Skills . Their grasp of the subject is clearly demonstrated when, according to a report on page 4 of this week’s British Journal of Photography (BJP) by Oliver Laurent, told him that any photographer could opt out of imaging licensing schemes that would allow usage of “orphan images” by phoning or e-mailing the licensing body.

The rather obvious flaw is that we are talking about images where by definition the photographer who created them is not known to the licensing body, so there is no way that they can exclude the images of any particular photographer. The only thing you could opt out of is payment for images that have been used through the scheme!

The IPO also think that any licensing scheme would not apply to images found online, whereas it seems fairly clear that this is by far the main source of such images and one that is most unlikely to remain untapped for any length of time by image users.

Although the proposal as it stands is a disaster, the idea of a body such as the Design and Artists Copyright Society (DACS) being able to licence the use of images whose copyright owner has not been determined is actually a good one, and could actually be a useful source of income for photographers. But there do need to be proper safeguards to protect our interests. Here are some of the points I think are vital:

there needs to be a clear and proper definition of the kind of ‘diligent search’ that has to be made before any image can be treated as an orphan image;
fees charge for usage of orphan images need to reflect the going commercial rates for the usage (which would be passed on to the claimant if a claim is made), plus an additional fee to cover the expenses of the licensing body;
all images licensed for use need to be displayed in a suitable way on a web site published by the licensing body so that photographers may readily search this to find when their images have been used so they can make a claim;
that firm action should be taken against any bodies which remove metadata from images as a matter of course when putting work on line;
that attribution for photographers should become mandatory for all printed and electronic media.

I think that legislation should also look again at the problem of photographers getting redress for any use of images without consent, and provide simplified processes and some greater sanction against unauthorised usage. At the moment there actually is probably little or no incentive for publishers to bother to licence orphan images.

The panel debate brought up some interesting points (and it was recorded and is now available on the London Photographers Branch web site) but I think failed to grasp the magnitude of the changes that are currently happening.

Martin Argles did tell us that the”official” line for The Guardian management was that print is dead and that the future is on the web, and we all know that the local press has already effectively disappeared in many parts of the country (there are still a few real local papers.) But I don’t think that the discussion really took these changes on board, nor the growth of citizen journalism and blogging.

But so far the web has failed to generate the kind of revenue needed to support the press as we know it, and in particular the kind of fees that we know are needed to keep photographers in business. The real problem with the web is also one of its great strengths, that content is almost entirely available free.

Some sites of course make money through the sale of goods, and others through advertising, traditionally the support for print newspapers and magazines. It’s proved hard to make enough, though I worked and made a reasonable part of my living through an advertising-supported commercial site for around 8 years. It isn’t a model I particularly like as it does very much distort what gets published – as we’ve seen in our newspapers and magazines over the years, driving us into the yards of drivel dribble over celebrities and sport that passes for news in most papers.

I’m not sure that the kind of subscription model that some newspapers are now advocating will succeed – there are too many free services, often providing more up to date and more accurate information. At the moment there isn’t a news equivalent of ‘Wikipedia’ but I suspect it may be a matter of time, and there are many detailed news reports appearing on various citizen journalism and other sites.

At the moment we pay our telecoms company (via our ISP where they are not the same) for providing bandwidth but make no contribution to those providing the content on that bandwidth. I hopethis is a situation that may change, although the charge could well be so low we would hardly notice it. Content providers – even this blog – would then have the option to register and claim their share.

But whatever happens I think there will in the future be very few still photographers able to make a living from photojournalism. There were a couple of interesting statistics that came up in the discussion last night. One that the number of staff photographers – I think in Britain – is now only around thirty, and the second that the number of photographers that graduate from our colleges each year is roughly the same as the total number of people making a living from photography.

Most of those people – and many of us currently in the business in various ways – will have to find other ways to make a living, and this isn’t really a new thing. Many of the photographers whose work I admire never really made a living from it, or did so only for a part of their working life. Some relied on partners or family to keep them going, others taught or worked at other jobs. Some lived on weddings or other social photography while pursuing their real work as a personal project.

Earlier I mentioned the BJP, and that is also changing. Established in 1854 it has been a weekly magazine since 1864, but this week’s issue is the last in the current format. The new version the magazine will now be on sale from the first Wednesday of every month for £6.99. I’ve yet to be convinced there is a point in the kind of monthly publication it intends to be, but it certainly has become much less important as a weekly publication, the print version lagging behind on-line sources of photography news. Because it was a weekly publication I’d often not only read the news that interested me but also written about it here before BJP had a chance to publish. But I’ll miss it as a weekly. Something I read with my lunch most Wednesdays.

If you are a photographer living or working in London, if you haven’t already joined the London Photographers Branch of the NUJ I’d suggest you consider it now. It’s good to be able to talk to others and discuss the problems and challenges we face on the job. It’s often good to know that you have a union that will give you support if you need it.

An Anti-social Act in Accrington

Photographing Santa Claus, people in fancy dress and a pipe band marching through the town constitutes suspicious and anti-social behaviour according to Lancashire police. The story and video taken by one of the two photographers stopped by police in Accrington a week before Christmas was published by The Guardian last Sunday. He was arrested and held for eight hours before being released without charge.

The two photographers taking pictures in the town centre were initially approached by a young police community support officer who stated she was questioning them under the Terrorism Act – obviously in direct contradiction of the advice issued to all police by the Home Office. The two men concerned could almost certainly have avoided a confrontation by telling her what they were doing rather than standing on their rights, but they took the latter course, and the situation escalated in a rather predictable way. The acting sergeant she brought in to back her up perhaps realised that the suggestion of terrorism was ridiculous, and instead came out with the accusation that taking photographs was an anti-social act.

It was a situation that was nothing to do with law and everything to do with saving police face, as the sound-track of the video which Bob Patefield kept running throughout the confrontation until after his arrest I think makes clear (the photographer accompanying him finally did give his name and address and was not arrested.)

The really disturbing part of the story for me is the attitude of the police authority. Rather than admitting that the officers concerned had made a mistake and apologising, Lancashire police, according The Guardian, issued a statement which said ‘”they and members of the public were “concerned about the way in which [Patefield] was using his camera”. It said police felt they had “no choice” but to arrest him because he was refusing to co-operate.’

I don’t actually think it generally makes sense for photographers – or citizens generally – not to cooperate with the police, although I think we do need to stand up for our rights to take photographs. If people – whether or not in uniform – ask me why I’m taking pictures I tell them, and if appropriate shown them some ID or offer them my business card.

Things are a little easier because I have a UK Press Card- for some years through the PPA and now from the NUJ – though it isn’t always a great deal of use and on several occasions police have simply refused to accept it as genuine. I also carry a copy of a letter from one of the libraries I put work in, confirming to “whom it may concern” that I work for them and giving a name and a phone number for any queries. In the past with some projects I’ve found it useful to carry some examples of my work to make it easier to explain to people what I am doing. Just because the law says I have a right to photograph in public places doesn’t mean that it isn’t sometimes a good idea to explain what I’m doing to anyone who is concerned or even just interested in what I’m doing.

I photographed on the streets for more than 20 years before I had a proper press card, and particularly during the IRA campaign was stopped by police quite a few times while taking pictures. Usually our exchanges were short and polite and both police and I soon happily continued on our ways getting on with our work. Actually I think they were often rather glad to get away as I do tend to go on a bit about photography.

Mr Patefield was almost certainly acting within the law in standing up for his rights, and appears to have been wrongly arrested. He may even be able to take a case against the police and get some compensation for what happened to him – as has happened to some others. I rather hope so.