>Re:PHOTO Peter Marshall - Thoughts on Photography

Where was St George?

I spent much of the day on April 23 looking for St George around the centre of London, and was largely disappointed. Celebration of our patron saint’s day still seems to be pretty low key, and I found a handful of members of the English Democratic Party in Trafalgar Square trying to drum up support for a national holiday every April 23. At least this year – unlike last – they were allowed to visit our National Gallery in the square, which was also putting on some related events. Apparently last year they were refused entry for wearing the national flag.

Others were in the square expecting something to happen, but without success, though when I returned later things were a little livelier. Meanwhile I knew that the theatre group, The Lions part, were giving some performances during the afternoon in Southwark and I went to take some pictures of St George and the others there.

There were other things going on that I missed, some on purpose. Boris took a trip to the City for some cheap publicity, and Southwark Cathedral and St Georges Church were also marking the day with events.

I went back to Trafalgar Square on my way to the Photographers’ Gallery, and found around 25 young people having a noisy time on the plinth below Nelson, and then another theatre group who had come out from their show in the National Gallery decided to put one on in the square also – with a little more audience participation than they are used to.

The latest show at the Photographers’ Gallery didn’t detain me long, though as always I read the texts and looked at the pictures and other objects. As before the most interesting work was on around the edges, in the print room (including a couple of nice prints by Thurston Hopkins – which reminded me very much of my own games on the streets in the 1950s) as well as work by Guy Tillim I’ve mentioned before. Although I appreciate a wide range of work across all the genres, the PG doesn’t seem to be showing much of quality outside the odd bit of photojournalism these days.

In the main show, the work of Gerhard Richter stood out rather more than head and shoulders above the rest (perhaps from the ankles up?) , though I don’t think the small photographs which he has over-painted actually have a great deal to do with photography or being a photographer – and there are some rather more interesting examples on the web site.

One of those admiring Hopkins work with me was Shimelis Desta, formerly the court photographer to the Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie, some of whose work was shown in the Photographers Gallery in 2007. You can see a CNN film about how he managed to get this work out of the country on YouTube. He tells me that he has more interesting images than those that were chosen by the curators for that show, so I hope that one day we will see more of his work.

Slough Vaisakhi

The Gurdwara Sri Guru Singh Sabha in the north of Slough is around ten miles – an easy bike ride – from my home, though I always do an extra half mile or so. Slough isn’t a place a visit too frequently, and something about it means I always get lost, despite knowing exactly where I want to go. Somehow, as usual, I end up in the middle of town on the wrong side of a wide road with a fence down the middle, and have to divert and cycle through a subway.

Fortunately I’d left home early, and arrived in plenty of time, well before much had started to happen. Photography often involves rather a lot of hanging around and waiting, because it isn’t much good arriving with your camera after things have happened – and the only time I’d come to Slough to photograph the Vaisakhi celebrations before I had been just a little late.

Being there early did give me the opportunity to go inside the Gurdwara and take a look around, and as well as taking a few pictures get to know my way around and talk to people.

I was at the top of the stairs when the procession came out of the prayer hall and made its way down and out to the crowds waiting below; all the time women were throwing flower petals over the Guru Granth Sahib and I joined them to take pictures from their viewpoint as the scriputres were carried to the waiting float.

Most of the pictures inside were taken with a 20mm lens on the Nikon D700, and this enabled me to work in rather crowded conditions. The 20mm is a nice compact lens too, and although in some ways I’d prefer a wide zoom, I’m getting to like working with a fixed lens again.

This was the first real set of pictures I’ve taken with the Nissin Di622 flash, and I was impressed. It just worked, and seemed to keep up rather better with my fairly rapid shooting than the SB800 generally does. I simply put it on the hot shoe, flipped out the diffuser to cover the wide angle and shot in ‘P’ mode, moving from indoor exposures of 1/60 at f5.6 to outdoors at 1/250 at f18 (at ISO 400.)

I’d tried shooting inside with available light earlier, and at ISO 2000 could work at around f4 and 1/100, but the colour was poor with the fluorescent lighting. On the stairs light levels were higher with a large window adding daylight, but the mixed lighting seemed an added problem. So flash seemed the obvious choice, although I felt a little obtrusive using it. But my previous experience photographing at other Vaisakhi celebrations and a Sikh wedding was that this was unlikely to present a problem to those I was photographing. And I did really want it for those petals.

More pictures from the event – many of those outdoors taken with a Sigma 18-125mm on the D300 – on My London Diary. The Sigma – which I’ve had for a few years – seems more robust than the Nikon 18-200mm, and has similar image quality – very usable rather than really superb. It lacks the VR of the Nikon lens, but I seldom seem to see much benefit from this in practice – and certainly not on sunny days. I have less focus problems with the Sigma, and its one fault is that the zoom ring works in the wrong direction.

Working with two bodies again does make life easier in most ways – though I wish they were lighter and came with straps that could never get entangled!

Orangemen on the March

I was brought up a Protestant, but not the marching kind. But perhaps our ‘Glorious Revolution‘ of 1688 that brought King William III to the throne in defence of both Parliamentary democracy and the Protestant faith is something we should celebrate more widely. Particularly in times such as this where I think Parliamentary democracy is endangered.

Orange Marches and the Orange Institution have of course been extremely contentious in parts of Northern Ireland but there seems little reason for them to be so in London, particularly as the Orange Institution has made clear it “will not accept into membership those with racist views or those who do not support the principle of civil and religious liberty for all.”

Although I had some trouble covering an earlier march by the Apprentice Boys of Derry where I reported “being pushed backwards by a large man in dark glasses and instructed very firmly to leave“, I’m pleased to say that today I wasn’t threatened – myself and the other photographers were treated very civilly – and one of the marchers complimented me on the pictures of a previous march on my web site.

More text and pictures on My London Diary.

Odd happenings in London

One of the great things about walking around London is that things happen. You turn a street corner and meet the unexpected.

On Saturday I was standing on the spot where I think Ian Tomlinson died, perhaps around a hundred yards from the floral tributes to him at the end of Royal Exchange buildings, where he was assaulted, I think for the second or third time, by a police officer. I wasn’t there, but I’ve read the accounts of some who were and viewed many of the videos and still images on the web from that day.

After receiving some help from nearby demonstrators (the police at that point appear to have simply laughed at his injured and confused state) he managed to stagger east down Cornhill, finally collapsing outside Starbucks or a neighbouring shop. Again some protesters went to his aid and finally police medics came to assist. He was taken into the mouth of St Michael’s Alley and, too late, an ambulance was called and allowed through the barriers.

Suddenly a group of people came along the alley, each bearing a single red rose, and crossed the road to stop at Starbucks. I photographed them and followed, thinking at first it was a tribute to Tomlinson I hadn’t heard about. Outside Starbuck’s we were treated to a highly moving performance of one of Shakespeare’s sonnets about the death of a young woman – and there was a picture of her and flowers taped to the shopfront.

Apparently by coincidence, this location had been chosen as one of a number on a trail from the Globe Theatre around various performances to celebrate the birthday of Shakespeare next Thursday. And I’m pleased to report that I was told that, unlike Ian Tomlinson, the young woman in the picture is still very much alive. I left the actor waiting to repeat his performance with the next group. More pictures on My London Diary.

Clogs and cheese

April 18 was presumably chosen for a kind of Dutch trade fair in Trafalgar Square because Koninginnedag (Queen’s Day) is celebrated on April 30, so perhaps that was thought close enough. Like other such ‘events’ it was a depressing spectacle, and I really only went there to use the public toilet, still free unlike most others in Westminster. Frankly, apart from some of the cheese (and too much of that reminds me more of soap) there was little to attract. The Amsterdam Orange Festival on Queen’s Day sounds far more interesting, with huge numbers of people dressed in orange and unregulated street trading across the city. Or perhaps we should have a Trafalgar Square event held in November in conjunction with Amsterdam’s High Times Cannabis Cup?

But there was another Orange event in London the same day which was perhaps more interesting. More details in my next post.

Stop Police Brutality

Last week I photographed two demonstrations against the police treatment of demonstrators, particularly at the April 1 demonstrations in the City of London, but also more generally.

There does seem to be a growing realisation that the police over the last few years have changed the emphasis in their policing of protests. The setting up of the para-military Tactical Support Group, trained and equipped for street combat, and the increasing use of surveillance techniques, including CCTV and the intentionally confrontational use of photography by the Forward Intelligence Teams have led to a raising of the temperature of inevitable friction between police and protesters. A temperature that “kettling” then increases to further heights until things too often boil over.

Increasing the police appear to see this as a battle, and come prepared, mentally and physically for a fight. The TSG in particular tend to stand like a group of thugs, bouncing on the balls of their feet, rubbing fists in palms, itching for a fight. It isn’t how I want police to be. As a placard on Saturday reminded us “The police serve society – they do not control society“. That’s how it should be, but increasingly not how it is.

Of course a part of the problem is legislation. Poorly thought out knee-jerk reactions to terrorism which have done little if anything to increase our security but have led to hundreds of highly publicised raids and arrests, but very few charges – and even many of those clearly unfounded, and thrown out by courts.

Police campaigns to increase paranoia – particularly against photographers – haven’t helped. Nor has the campaign they have mounted against the press, which was very evident on April 1, with injuries to a number of my colleagues. They also threatened many journalists with arrest to try to clear them away at Bank, apparently because they didn’t want witnesses to the use of police dogs on the protesters.

One piece of legislation that has led to more friction than any other is SOCPA, where late additions were made to an act dealing with serious organised crime with the intention of outlawing the protest in Parliament Square by Brian Haw. The act failed to stop his protest but made it an offence to protest in a wide area of Westminster without getting police permission in advance. Its main effect has been a vast increase in the number of demonstrations – both legal and illegal – many directed at the act itself, with a few unfortunate individuals being targeted for often rather dubious prosecutions.

At the protest outside New Scotland Yard on Wednesday evening, police pointed out to the organisers that their protest on the wide expanse of pavement outside the building was illegal, and asked them to move to the other side of the street where it would be legal. The very narrow pavement there made such a move impractical, and unsurprisingly when the matter was put to the demonstrators they were unanimous in deciding to stay put.

City of London Police were rather more relaxed at the demonstration outside their Wood St headquarters on Saturday morning, attended by three of the large ‘Four Horseman of the Apocalypse‘ puppets from the April 1 carnival at Bank and the remains of the fourth destroyed there. Some of the protesters also showed signs of the attacks by police on demonstrators there and on the even more peaceful Climate Camp in Bishopsgate.

More pictures and details of events at New Scotland Yard and City of London Police HQ on My London Diary.

Ballard Dies

There have probably been relatively few famous inhabitants of Shepperton, a small suburban corner of Middlesex within spitting distance of where I live, but unquestionably J G Ballard who died on Sunday, age 78, was one of them.

Certainly one of Britains major post-war writers, James Graham Ballard saw the future embodied in the present culture, and wrote his own apocalyptic ‘Ballardian’ version of it, based strongly around the outer suburbs where he – and I – live. He clearly foresaw the surveillance society and many of the problems of late capitalism.

Best known for his ‘Empire of the Sun‘, a superbly written work based around his experiences as a child in the Japanese internment camps in China and made into a film, it was his other works which are more important, perhaps culminating in his last novel, Kingdom Come (2006), firmly set in the suburban zone around the M25. In many ways close to home.

It was a great disappointment to me that the film ‘Crash‘ was migrated by its Canadian director to Toronto. The book was very firmly set in the Heathrow area, and, although I’m not sure it would have been a better film in West London/Middlesex, it would certainly have added to its relevance for me.

I wrote briefly about him and his work, and how it had inspired some of my own photography in ‘Under The Car‘, based on a section of a lecture I gave in 2007 in Brasilia.

A Ballardian landscape © Peter Marshall

G20 Bank Videos

More and more videos are coming onto the web giving a fuller view of the protests in the City of London on April 1, and in particular of the way the police handled the demonstrations.

The Guardian was of course the first to feature the assault on IanTomlinson just before his fatal heart attack, and among the other highlights there is a short clip by Jason Parkinson, showing police carrying out a baton charge on press photographers. Another clip by Jason records police threatening press photographers under Section 14 of the Public Order Act, telling them to leave the scene and stop taking pictures – or be arrested (they later issued an apology for this.) Others worth viewing include Rikki Blue‘s footage of riot police attacking peaceful demonstrators at the Climate Camp in Bishopsgate.

If what happened at Bank and in Bishopsgate can be called riots, on the evidence of the videos the rioters are mainly the police, although you can clearly see a few minor incidents involving demonstrators in the videos. The breaking of windows at the RBS was an isolated ocurrence, which involved few people and was soon abandoned. On Jason Parkinson’s blog you can see a good impression of rather more of a riot at in Strasbourg where the NATO summit was taking place on April 4. This is serious stuff, where the photographer’s kit needs to include helmet, gas mask and body armour.

Here in London things are usually more sedate, and only the police get kitted up with riot gear, (which always seems to alter the way they behave) although photographers may well need to rethink after April 1. Another video of the events by Ollie Wainwright on Vimeo includes footage of David Hoffman, a veteran photographer perhaps best known for his pictures of the Poll Tax Riots, being attacked by a policeman using a riot shield to beat him in the face. There is a lengthy slideshow of his pictures of the day on his web site.

Hoffman bets that no other photographer used a senior citizen bus pass to get the the event, and he may be right, but only because I chose to walk from the station as I was early and to take the underground when I left early to go to the peaceful march in the West End. The pictures that I took before I left give a good impression of the kind of peaceful demonstrations that the organisers of both the G20 Meltdown and the Climate Camp had planned and were taking place before the police intervened.

There were perhaps 5-10,000 peaceful demonstrators in the City and probably less than a couple of hundred who had come with the intention of making real trouble. Sensible policing would have isolated the troublemakers rather than attacking everyone indiscriminately.

Photoshop – Several Steps Too Far?

A day or two ago I came across a link to a feature on the Danish Press photography site, Pressefotografforbundet, which was an English translation of an earlier post about the Danish Pictures of the Year competition. Klavs Bo Christensen who had sent in pictures on a story he shot in Haiti had been asked by the judges to submit his RAW files for the images concerned, and they had then decided to disqualify his work.

The competition rules state that pictures entered:

“must be a truthful representation of whatever happened in front of the camera during exposure. You may post-process the images electronically in accordance with good practice. That is cropping, burning, dodging, converting to black and white as well as normal exposure and color correction, which preserves the image’s original expression.”

Having seen the work – which is on the site – I’m surprised that it’s disqualification has aroused any controversy. It clearly – at least to my eyes – goes far beyond what I would consider “a truthful representation” and takes the work more in to the province of illustration rather than of photography. Had I been one of the judges I would have turned it down as inappropriate without feeling the need to examine the RAW files.

RAW files are not of course image files, and need suitable processing. In the article this is done as a comparison to the submitted images using the default setting of Adobe Camera Raw, and clearly a little more is needed on all three images shown. Unless I’m in a tearing hurry, I seldom accept the default ‘Autotone‘ result from Lightroom. As I used to in the darkroom, I’ll often do a little dodging and burning, and with the digital file I’ll usually also take advantage of the ease with which you can open up the shadows a little. The default settings often compress the highlights rather more than I like, and again I’ll correct this. And the auto setting normally fails to produce either high key or low key images and should I have been aiming at these effects, a more drastic tonal rearrangement is called for.

I may not get it right, but my aim is always to produce images that look photographic, where the viewer essentially isn’t aware of the process but in a sense feels they are looking through the picture to what is depicted, retaining the essence of the photograph as some kind of a trace of the original scene. For me the photograph is very much a ‘window’, although I always felt that Szarkowski was totally wrong to suggest that it could not at the same time be a powerful ‘mirror.’

Of course it has always been possible to use photography in different ways, for example to give a negative of the scene, or to solarize or posterize the image. But such graphic effects are designed very much to distance the photographically produced images from the original photographic expression, what we might call an experimental approach rather than the realist approach that is central to photojournalism and documentary work.

So I’m 100% behind the judges. This work, with its extremes of saturation and local contrast should never have been entered for the competition. There have been some images in other competitions – even World Press Photo – that I’ve thought perhaps have gone a little beyond the acceptable, but these are more extreme.

I’m not saying that they are bad pictures, but that the treatment is unsuitable for the purpose. If pushed I would say that two of the three shown clearly don’t work very well, and although the default conversions from RAW do still need a little tweaking, clearly there is a better photograph that could have been made from them than the pictures the photographer sent in. With the third, the bottom image on the page with a yellow chair and a blue concrete beam, this graphic treatment is rather more successful. It is also rather harder to tell from the default processed RAW file exactly what a more photographic approach could have achieved from this file.

These pictures were taken up yesterday on The Online Photographer, where there is quite a lot of discussion both of yesterday’s post and a follow-up today.

As Mike Johnston says there “If you like the wretched excess of the overhyped, overcooked style, go for itit’s your hobby; you own it. They’re your pictures.” And there are certainly plenty of people on Flickr who do seem to like it. It makes me cringe, and it certainly isn’t appropriate for photojournalism.

Stop Sri Lanka’s Genocide of Tamils

The British Tamils Forum organised another massive protest march in London on April 11th, marching from Temple to a rally in Hyde Park. The march began around 1.30 pm, and by the time I left around 4.15pm stretched most of the way from Westminster to Hyde Park.

When even the police give an estimate of numbers as 100,000 you can be sure it is a very big march, and as the crowds were generally pretty solidly packed there seems little reason to question the independent estimates of around 150-200,000 people.

The vast majority of them were Tamils, with probably only a few hundred white faces. There didn’t seem to be a great deal of media interest, and I saw no photographers from major newspapers or news agencies and no cameras from major UK TV stations. It was such a large event that I could have missed them, but usually at the start of marches there is a crowd of media in front, while on Saturday there was just me, three other photographers, none of whom get regular work for the mass media and a Tamil with a video camera.

However it was reported by some, including the BBC where three very short paragraphs and an indifferent photo accompany a longer piece on the two Tamil hunger strikers in Parliament Square.

It was quite a contrast with the Bethnal Green march on the death of Ian Tomlinson earlier in the day, a small event where there were almost as many media as marchers, with all the major agencies, papers, channels and most of the freelances I know putting in an appearance.

The Tamil march was also very much a family event – at one time I found myself facing a row of around 20 push chairs, and they were many children carrying placards and being carried on shoulders, as well as crowds of young people and students, and adults of all ages, including some who looked old enough to be my mother or father.

They were united in their opposition to the killing of Tamils in Sri Lanka, but also the vast majority of those marching in some way expressed their support for the LTTE, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. A few carried actual tigers, fortunately only large toys, but many wore the colours or carried flags or portraits of the founder and leader of the Tamil Tigers, Velupillai Pirapaharan (sometimes spelt spelt Prabhakaran.)

In the UK, the LTTE has been a proscribed organisation under the Terrorism Act 2000 since 2000. This makes it a terrorist offence for a person to support the group or wear clothing which arouses the “reasonable suspicion that he is a member or supporter of a proscribed organisation.” Police sensibly made no attempt to arrest all 200,000 marchers on Saturday despite their clear breach of the Act.

Although enthusiastic, the Tamils had no intention of causing serious trouble in London and only three arrests were reported. I saw only one small incident, where police prevented marchers from carrying a dummy with a photograph which of Sri Lanka’s President Mahinda Rajapaksa as its face. Once this photograph was removed they allowed them to continue.

But her’s another getting shoe’d

Britain has a long history of lack of care for the Tamils in Sri Lanka, going back to colonial days. When we gave Ceylon independence in 1948 we neglected to take any precautions to safeguard their interests. Within a very short time many had been disenfranchised and deported as “Indian Origin” Tamils, whose ancestors had been brought to the country by the British in the middle of the previous century. Since then there has been a continued programme of repression, religious discrimination and marginalisation of Tamils, with Sri Lanka being established as a Buddhist republic in 1972. The LTTE was founded in 1976, and for some years until 2006 large parts of the Tamil areas of the country came under their civil administration.

At least a part of the LTTE success for many years came from the extreme and desperate measures that they have used, including assassinations and suicide bombings. Both sides in the conflict have committed numerous atrocities against civilians. Various international attempts to broker peace over the years came to an end in 2006, since when the Sri Lankan army has been engaged in a full-scale assault on the Tamil areas and the LTTE seem now very close to final defeat as an organised military force, although they are expected to re-emerge as a guerilla group.

At the moment the Sri Lankan government’s policy appears to be aimed at the complete annihilation of the LTTE and much of the Tamil population. Others are being resettled in transit camps and then ‘welfare villages’ which may seem rather more like prison camps than normal life. At the moment it seems unlikely that there will be any effective intervention by outside powers to prevent the genocide of the Sri Lankan Tamils; David Miliband did phone to ask the Sri Lankan government not to return to a full-out assault following their two-day cease-fire,but his plea seems unlikely to be taken seriously. The situation is desperate and although marches like this should call attention to it, the mass media hardly seem to find it newsworthy. We appear to be approaching a truly scandalous climax to years largely of scandalous indifference.

It takes only a few seconds to send an e-mail letter to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights about the Tamil crisis and there is also a petition form which can be downloaded on the Tamil Writers Guild, for filling in and faxing to your MP or Gordon Brown.

G20 Demo at Excel Centre

Sorry, forgot to publish this one last week!

Like almost everyone else, I couldn’t get near the Excel Centre on Thursday 2 April when the G2o were in session. So here’s a picture I took earlier!

But half a mile down the road where we were allowed to protest was a rather lively demonstration about Ogaden and Oromo, where the Ethiopian government is fighting the Ogaden National Liberation Front and the Oromo Liberation Front and generally setting out to prove it is the most brutal regime in the world.

More about these protests and a few others – including a small group from Stop the War/CND on My London Dairy