>Re:PHOTO Peter Marshall - Thoughts on Photography

Julius Shulman 1910-2009

Julius Shulman, born in 1910 in Brooklyn, New York, who became America’s best known architectural photographer, largely for his pictures of the new modern architecture in California, died on 15 July aged 98. You can read obituaries in The Guardian and most other newspapers from around the world.

Shulman’s Russian parents had met in their teens when both came to New York from Russia, and soon after his birth the family moved to rural Connecticut where his father farmed on around a hundred acres, several miles from the nearest village. It was a close to nature subsistence upbringing, living on an isolated farm with a single farmhand.

In 1990 Shulman recorded an interview with Taina Rikala De Noreiga for the Smithsonian Institution Archives of American Art – and much of what I know about his life comes from this, which was a major source when I first wrote about him in 2001 for About Photography. Here he says that the farm “was the beginning of my association with Nature” which remained important throughout his life.

When he was ten the family moved west to California, and his parent ran a dry goods store in Los Angeles, continued by his mother after his father died in 1923. Shulman joined the boy scouts and went hiking and camping and went to a high school that – very unusually for the time – included photography as one of its classes.

He started taking pictures for the class when he was 17, using the family ‘Eastman Box Camera’, but although his work was good, didn’t consider it as a career. He had decided to go to university and study electrical engineering, and took a year out before starting at UCLA in 1929 to earn some money and buy his first car, as well as spending as much time as possible in the outdoors.

He soon dropped out of the college course, but continued to hang out around the campus. He was given a Vest Pocket Kodak as a birthday present and began to use it to take pictures on his hikes. When a friend who was a student at Berkeley suggested he move there, he took the camera and began to make a few dollars taking portraits of students there and selling pictures of the older campus buildings through the campus shop.

In 1936 he went back to Los Angeles, where his sister ran a drug store close to architect Richard Neutra’s office. A new young draughtsman who joined Neutra took the spare room in his sister’s house and the two young men became friends. One Sunday afternoon he took Shulman to look around a house Neutra had designed that was almost finished, and Shulman took half a dozen pictures.

His new friend took some 8x10s of these pictures to show his boss who liked them and asked to meet the photographer – and on 5 March 1936 when Netra bought these prints, Shulman’s career as an architectural photographer was launched. Neutra introduced him to the other architects he knew, including Raphael Soriano, Rudolf Schindler and Gregory Ain, and commissioned him to photograph his own new buildings.

In 1937, Shulman was earning enough to buy a view camera, and he also got married.; at that time photography was a fairly easy way to earn a living and left him plenty of time to go walking and camping. The start of the war brought new commissions as new factories were built, but then his career was interrupted when he had to join the army. He worked for two years as a medical photographer on a private’s pay.

His wife kept the business going during his service, getting prints made and selling these, particularly to the architecture collection of the Museum of Modern Art. The young architects whose work he had recorded were becoming famous, and pictures were in demand.

Shulman’s successful career as an architectural photographer resumed in the post-war years. His pictures very much shared a modernist aesthetic with those architects whose work he famously photographed, and his ‘retirement’ in 1987 was probably as much a matter of changing styles of architecture which he felt little interest in as anything else.

He did in fact continue to take photographs, but was able to choose just the best of the new buildings as his subjects, including Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain and Richard Meier’s Getty Center in Los Angeles. He was the only photographer to be granted honorary lifetime membership by the American Institute of Architects.

Shulman’s best known image is picture of Pierre Koenig‘s Case Study House #22, Los Angeles, California. made at night in 1960. In it two women are suspended in a glass and steel box apparently floating over the night-time grid of the lights of Hollywood below. It was created on a single sheet of film, combining a long time exposure with a second short flash lit exposure for the interior, and you can read exactly how it was done in a fascinating Taschen feature, The Making of an Icon, which reunited the six people involved in the shot in 2001.

Also worth looking at are L A Obscura, the web site of a 1998 exhibition of his photography at the University of Southern California, and a feature for the 2005/6 show at the Getty. You can also watch a short trailer for the film ‘Visual Acoustics, The Modernism of Julius Shulman‘ which includes a little footage of the man himself.

I’m not sure that Shulman was “the greatest architectural photographer of all time“, but he was certainly a very good one, and the best-known of American architectural photographers of the 20th century.

Wikimedia, Gage and Orphan Works

Whenever two or three photographers are gathered together issues of copyright are seldom far away, and increasingly they hit the news too.

Almost all the pictures on this site are by me. When I wrote and blogged for a commercial site (About.com) for eight years I was required to have explicit written consent for any images used other than those that were unequivocally in the public domain, and its a policy that I’ve stuck to pretty rigidly here. After all, I don’t like others taking my images in vain.

The strength of the Internet is very much in how it links sites together, and takes users on some fascinating journeys. If I want readers to see an image by another photographer, I’d generally prefer to take them to that photographers website, where as well as the image I refer them to they may find other things to interest them. A good link is much more than an image.

Wikimedia and the NPG

Three things about copyright have come to my attention recently. The first hit the national news when the English National Portrait Gallery (NPG) threatened Wikipedia over the uses of images from its collection.

The pictures in the collection are clearly out of copyright, being paintings of considerable age. The dispute is over whether the NPG can claim copyright in its reproductions of these images.

Despite the fact that it takes skill and considerable expense to make accurate photographic reproductios of paintings, it would seem to me to be something that was clearly and deliberately outside the traditional definition of copyright. This clearly stated that it must involve articles of artistic intent rather than those that were a matter of mechanical reproduction.

So far as I’m aware, British courts have never been asked to rule on this specific matter, and although at least one leading UK copyright lawyer has given his opinion that such works are copyright, I’ve heard others express a differing view. In the US, the case of Bridgeman v. Corel gave a clear decision that such works were in the public domain, but still many museums continue to claim copyright.

Phineas Gage

A similar case exists over the privately owned daguerreotype of Phineas P Gage 1823-1860 in the Wilgus collection. I can’t get too worked up over it – it isn’t a great example of the daguerreotype art although Gage is mildly interesting – an early victim of an industrial accident, he was a railway builder who had his head pierced through by an iron rod he was using to pack gunpowder which exploded prematurely. Although the rod went in his left cheek and out through the top of his head, he survived for a further 11 years. The photo shows him holding the large rod and with a missing eye.

The dispute here was largely that the image was originally placed on the web site with a visible watermark across Gage. Following a rather furious Internet spat, the owners have re-posted it with the watermark across the case – possibly more interesting than the actual portrait!

Private Ownership and Public Institutions

Both these cases are essentially not so much about copyright as about the business interests of the owners of the original in supplying high res images for reproduction. Owners of public domain images are in general under no obligation to put them on the web and have every right to charge a fee for supplying files, and to impose a suitable licence on their use.

A note on the Gage page states: “High resolution photographs without a watermark are available for reproduction. Contact us for information on usage fees. For several years we have had an informal business supplying images in our collection to publishers, film, and television producers for a modest fee. We often grant permission for educational and non-profit usage, asking only for a credit line and, perhaps, a copy of the publication if it interests us.” I find it hard to find fault with this.

For the National Portrait Gallery, the situation is I think different. It is a publicly funded body, and it’s my and others taxes that have paid for these images and indeed for their reproduction. The pictures belong to us and it is a central part of the NPG’s remit to make them available as widely as possible. Hard to see a better way to meet its obligations than by allowing Google to use them.

The NPG appears to have a poor reputation over its attitude to reproduction of works in the collection. In the comments on the Wikimedia blog you can read this from someone working for a UK publisher:
“Id just like to say that the National Portrait Gallery is one of the worst offenders in the world in its digital practices. The terms and conditions (quite apart from the cost) associated with getting permission to use one of their images itself a pretty offensive idea, I know are so bad that you cant really afford to do business with them.

This is particularly bad because the NPG often holds the only good image of a historical figure. Im publishing the only book in some decades about a minor 18th-century writer, for instance, whom the NPG owns the only contemporary painting of. Its the obvious choice for a cover image. But we cant afford the money or the legal obstacles, so its not on our cover. Instead were using an obscure etching of a sketch made towards the exact same painting.

If I had to name one museum or gallery in the UK as the chief villain in this all-too-common story, the NPG would be the one.”

It does seem likely that a compromise will be reached in this case also; an NPG spokeswoman is reported by the BBC to have been said that they would be willing to supply medium resolution images of its public domain works to Wikipedia.

Orphan Works

The third thing that I read a month or two ago was a post by Dan Heller on the “odds between the myth and reality of the OWA” (Orphan Works Act.)

What I think this makes clear is that the problem that photographers – or at least 99% of photographers – have is not the likely consequences of the OWA, but with US Copyright Law as it has been since 1976 (at least.) This essentially went against the terms of the Berne Copyright Convention in requiring registration of works at the US Copyright Office for effective copyright protection.

As Heller states, “99% of photographers dont register their works. So, for them, the OWA is inconsequential.”

He goes further to argue that for the 1% who do register the OWA is “a new sales opportunity, one that cannot be compared to any other: the searchable database might allow users to find your works.”

This post in May was Heller’s first in association with PicScout, a partnership that didn’t long survive the posting. The PicScout bot, used by Getty Images, Corbis and others to discover unauthorised image usage, has aroused some strong feelings on the Internet, for example being described by William Faulkner as “potentially criminal and certainly unethical.” Faulkner points out – among other things – that it’s behaviour is expressly forbidden in the terms of usage of Getty Images’ own web site.

Emergency Alternative Parliament

I’ve photographed demonstrations organised by the Campaign Against Climate Change for around ten years, at first of course on film and now on digital. Often they’ve had some nice visual touches that make life easy for photographers – one of the earlier occasions I remember involved a rather attractive female ‘tiger’ being pushed through London on a bed, which was fine until the wheels fell off!

But one thing that’s made life difficult for us in recent years is their trademark globe in a greenhouse. I’ve yet to find a sensible way to really use it in any photograph over the years, though it was less of a problem than usual. It even sort of fits quite nicely into a few pictures, with the Houses of Parliament behind.

The demonstration was in Old Palace Yard, tucked in behind Westminster Abbey facing Parliament. It’s just a little frustrating that it’s almost impossible to see ‘Big Ben’ (or rather its clocktower) from there, although I did manage to get the odd picture where it peeps around an edge.

But at least there were a few things to add visual interest, not least the ‘Green Queen’ who looked suspiciously like a mermaid I’ve often photographed. Tamsin Omand with her ‘Deeds Not Words’ sash and the ‘Speaker’ also added a little, although considerably less once he lost his wig. It’s apparently the most daring constitutional change our current government has yet made.

Of course people are interesting, but it has to be said some more so than others, and trying to produce varied images from a succession of speakers can be hard. Some give photographers a tough time, keeping their eyes closed or looking down. You can see what I made of them – and other pictures from the event on My London Diary, as well as something about the purpose of the event. The banner in the second picture has a pretty good précis!

The lighting was interesting at times, with sunshine and showers, though unfortunately no rainbow in the right place (or anywhere else.) The rain was a bit a a nuisance, but fortunately all three lenses I was using have lens hoods that help a little, and the occasional wipe with a microfibre cloth kept cameras and filter free of drops.

Lensculture Audio

I’m not generally a huge fan of interviews with photographers which too often fail to illuminate their work, particularly if they are in glossy magazines and supplements. Too often interviewers fail to ask the right questions, and sometimes photographers seem to have little idea of the answers.

But over the years I’ve listened to a number of Jim Casper’s audio conversations on Lensculture with interest, and often linked to them from posts here and elsewhere. So it’s good to have a whole collection of them linked from a single page there, each with a small photograph and a transcript of an excerpt from the audio.

I’m not sure whether it’s that Jim asks the right questions or that he chooses the right photographers – but every one I’ve listened to so far is worth a listen. Or perhaps there are conversations he records that don’t make it to the site.

What I do think is missing is an index. At the moment there are (I think) 38 photographers and it’s very easy to miss some as you scroll down the very long page, three to a row. Its a problem that can only get worse as Jim talks to more people and adds them to the page.

Swan Uppers and Downers

Although traditionally the Swan Uppers started their journey up the Thames at the City of London, in recent times they have missed out the tidal river, starting just a few miles upstream of Teddington at Sunbury lock. In recent years I’ve joined them on my bicycle at Shepperton or Chertsey, cycling with them along the towpath to lunch at Staines (which they took, appropriately, at the Swan Inn) and then in the afternoon going on with them to Windsor.

This year, the Uppers have deserted that stretch of the river altogether and start their journey at Eton College boathouse. I might have considered joining them there, but for the fact that it is going to be a royal affair, with the Queen expected to join the event at Boveney Lock.

I’m not in favour of the monarchy – it’s a shame we’ve still got one. I find the continuing interest in the press on the royals depressing, and have no wish to add or encourage it in any way. Even if I did want to take pictures, royal events are bad news for photographers not in the exclusive clique of the royal rota with very limited opportunities and heavy security. So Monday is a day I’d choose to avoid.

Back in 2001 I was still using film, and the best pictures I made were panoramic format using the Hasselblad XPan with a 30mm wide-angle, though the picture above was I think made with the Konica Hexar – I think of it as the Leica M9, though the build quality wasn’t quite there, but it had autowind and rather better metering than the M series. You can see more pictures – including a few of those pans on My London Diary, as well as those from 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007 and 2008.

Of course Swan Upping was always a royal event – the guys in the red jackets making the loyal toast in Romney Lock are the Queen’s Swan Uppers, but she didn’t come down from the castle to the lock.

I didn’t bother to photograph this part of the event until 2007, when there was a real fear that swan upping might be coming to an end. Photographing the loyal toast is pretty simple, as all the boats are in the lock and pretty static. Much harder is the salute between the crews at the end of the day which used to take place a few hundred yards downstream, where the river banks are lined by trees and bushes. It’s also spread across the width of the river, with the Dyers two boats close to one bank and the Vintners on the other. They come to a halt and stand up holding oars vertical, giving the two boats containing the Queen’s men a cheer as they pass through the middle, also standing with their oars raised, and returning the salute.

This is about the best of a rather poor crop of my attempts to photograph it. I had hoped I might do better this year, and was disappointed to learn of the changed schedule.

London Photographers Branch

Yesterday there was a meeting attended by just over 30 photographers with an overwhelming vote (26 for, 1 against, 1 abstention) for the formation of a London Photographers Branch (LPB) of the NUJ. Of course forming a new union branch is a matter for the National Executive Committee to decide, but yesterday’s meeting certainly makes it more likely.

Debate at the meeting was almost entirely about the geographical nature of the proposed branch, which for several reasons, most particularly the union’s constitution, seemed irrelevant and at times more about particular photographer’s emotional issues than the substance of the matter. A motion proposing it be proposed as a ‘national’ branch was reject by a roughly 2:1 majority.

Photographers (and videographers) do face different problems working on the streets to other journalists, and these have been particularly acute for those working in London both because it it the focus of so much protest but also because of the particular responses of the Met.

The NUJ was formed in an earlier age, essentially based around the ‘chapel’ or workplace organisation. There are also branches set up on a geographical basis – such as the unions largest branch, the London Freelance Branch (LFB), to which many of those at the meeting currently belong.

Most photographers are freelance, with fewer staff and agency positions every year, and they share many of their problems with other freelances – so being a part of the LFB makes sense. The LFB has tried its best to recognise and cater for the special problems photographers face – photographers form a large percentage of its membership and committee – but I think many photographers feel it is unsatisfactory.

Membership of the proposed LPB would be open to all photographers who work in London wherever they live – and would certainly include many based in London who spend much of their time working elsewhere around the world. It would both freelance, agency and also staff photographers, (you can belong both to a chapel and a branch, but only one branch) thus uniting photographers in all modes of employment.

Photography isn’t just an issue for photographers. At a time when more and more journalists are being handed cameras and told to take photographs, does it make sense to separate ourselves from our fellow union members in a separate branch? Only I think because the NUJ doesn’t appear to allow any other way forward.

For some years the NUJ has repeatedly turned down the need for a photography organiser to work for the particular interests of photographers – and I would expect the LPB to continue the pressure on this. Photographers based wherever the union has chapels or branches need to see their special needs recognised throughout the union.

These are of course hard times for photographers – and also for other journalists, both with changing technology and economic conditions. Times when we need the union more than ever, and the support of our colleagues.

At the end of the meeting a freelance working for the Guardian/Observer brought up the issue of the rights grab they intend to impose on contributors. In April the management made a decision to stop paying fees for any re-use of images. Guardian freelances refused the new terms and are being supported by staff in the Guardian chapel, but so far the management has refused to talk.

The Guardian’s action strikes at the very core of photographers copyright and rights management, although it isn’t something that solely affects photographers. Of course if we let the Guardian get away with it, then others will surely follow their lead.

Subotzky Wins Barnack Award

Oskar Barnack (18791936) was of course the inventor of the Leica, a photographer who wanted to make use of 35mm movie film for taking still images, and his pictures of the 1920 floods in Wetzlar qualify as the first reportage series taken with a still camera on 35mm.

Leica started an annual photographic award named after him to make the 100th anniversary of his birth in 1979, and this year, the 30th award was supplemented with a Newcomer Award for photographers under 25. Both are for “photographers whose unerring powers of observation capture and express the relationship between man and the environment in the most graphic form in a sequence of up to 12 images … in which the photographer perceives and documents the interaction between man and the environment with acute vision and contemporary visual style creative, groundbreaking and unintrusive.” In other words very much the mode of photography that the Leica made possible. The prizes aren’t huge – 5000 and 25000 euros respectively – but the prestige is, with the prizes being presented as a part of the Arles Rencontres.

This year’s winner is South African Mikhael Subotzky (b1981) who became a Magnum Nominee in 2007 and he has more work on his own site, all of it worth a look. He was one of my ‘Top 5′ from PDN’s 30 to watch in 2008 – and again got a mention here when he won the Infinity Young Photographer award the same year.

The Newcomer award went to Swiss-born photographer http://dominicnahr.com/main/ Dominic Nahr for his photographic essay from the Congo, titled The Road to Nowhere. He was one of PDN’s ’30’ to watch this year.

These awards are easy to enter on-line and attract very many entrants from around the world, including some of the best known photojournalists. All of the entries get displayed on the site, and you can look through them in various ways. By default the page that opens in my browser includes James Nachtwey, Bruno Stevens and others whose names I recognise. You can also look at the entries sorted by name – although entrants can choose to use a nickname – a letter of the alphabet at a time, or by country.

Although British entrants are labelled ‘Great Britain’ you will find them under U, though be warned, navigating the sideways scrolling site is somewhat like riding a bucking bronco (perhaps it worked better on the designers own system, but a simpler approach would have been preferable.) Eventually I did manage to find about 30 UK entrants for the main award, covering an extremely wide range of work, with a few of the best photographers around, down to work that could have come from almost any class of students and just one or two that seemed typically Flickr. There were fewer UK entries for the Newcomer Award, but some interesting work among them.

I couldn’t see anywhere the total number of entrants, but it must be pretty huge, and it takes a while for the “Show all” file to download (certainly longer than it took me to type this paragraph.) Fortunately you can start looking through the images before it finishes, but it isn’t easy to handle. There is so much on-line here that I find it difficult to cope, and it isn’t clear how long it will remain on line. Perhaps the best way to view it is the alphabetical listing and I mean to look through perhaps a letter a day, picking a few that interest me to click on to see the whole series.

Black Friday – Still Catching Up

Last Friday was Black Friday here. Literally in that around 10am when I was getting down to work on my computer, the screen suddenly went black and the system started to reboot. My hope were raised as Windows loaded again, but dashed a few seconds later when I got the message “Windows has recovered from a serious fault” and then everything went black again – and this time the computer didn’t reboot.

I used to work a lot with computers and have often fixed other peoples, but this had me beat. I couldn’t persuade the system to boot from a CD, and nothing looked obviously wrong when I opened up the box, though it was very dusty!

I unplugged the inessentials and tried again with no luck, and eventually I gave up, sulked for a bit, then called out a repair service. They told me an engineer could come in around 4 hours, though after4 hours they phoned to revise that to 6. I’d hoped to go out and take pictures but instead found myself staying in for the call.

The good news was that he eventually got it going. The bad news that it took him an hour and a half at expensive rates, and that he couldn’t really identify the fault. Removing the memory then replacing just one of the four memory modules brought it back to life, but it continued to work when all four were replaced, and all passed the memory tests on his diagnostic software. Perhaps it was just a poor or corroded contact, possibly on the memory but perhaps somewhere else on the motherboard, disturbed by the pressure on removing and replacing memory. Perhaps a short circuit somewhere broken.

So I now am considerably poorer, have lost a day’s work on the computer and half a day’s photography and have a computer with a doubtful motherboard. It could well go again any time, though at least I can now do everything that worked for that engineer without having to pay anyone else!

If there is plus point it’s that it’s made me think more carefully about what I can do to save things if the system does go again. While waiting for the repairman I set up email on another computer, and checked that I had all my essential files backed up on an external hard disk (most of them were there.) I also installed a copy of the free Raw Therapee v2.4 conversion software – it’s an old computer that isn’t powerful enough for Lightroom or recent versions of Capture One Pro, and none of the software already on it could read D300 or D700 files.

Raw Therapee does seem to produce decent results, but trying it out in case I needed to process the job I had booked in for the following day I was soon very aware why I use Lightroom. And very relieved that the computer was up and running when I needed it.

Firstly, workflow and in particular the much better design of the interface. Raw Therapee seems too much of a community effort, with everyone wanting their own particular bell or whistle included, rather than picking the best approach.

Then I’ve become entirely addicted to the various possibilities of Lightroom’s ‘Adjustment Brush’ – allowing local adjustment of exposure, brightness, contrast, saturation, clarity and colour – in any combination. Being able to define presets for particular purposes is extremely helpful – I’ve got one called ‘Remove Highlights’ and another called ‘Spotoff’ – which works well together with the supplied preset ‘Soften Skin’.

And finally the whole output side is easier to use – and I’ve set up all the presets that I need for different purposes.

I haven’t quite managed to catch up with what I missed, and haven’t quite decided what to do about the computer. The serviceman suggested it was probably time to think about a new one as it’s hardly worth replacing motherboards these days and systems are now so cheap. But it seems so wasteful.

And of course I’ve been checking my backups, although I lost none of the files on my hard disk – except for the anti-virus that was corrupted and had to be removed and re-installed. But today I’ve been busy writing out more of my images on to DVD.

DVD may not be good for long term storage, but there is something satisfying about a box full of disks that you can take out and put into almost any computer. Of course I also have the files on removable hard disks, the latest a 1 Tb Toshiba USB 2.0 model that cost me under £70 (now £75) and will store around 80,000 NEF RAW files. I’m happier with belt and braces.

Although digital photography has many advantages – and I often mention some of them – it has made us entirely reliant on computers. If you’ve not thought about what would happen if your computer suddenly stopped working, now would be a good time to do so.

Pride 2009 – and nearly a fall

I failed to photograph the only slogan I saw at Pride that made me laugh or at least smile; one of those times when you see something and for some reason don’t photograph it, intending to do so later. But later seldom happens.

So I didn’t get a picture. But it doesn’t really need a picture – and probably why I didn’t photograph it was that it didn’t make a good picture. “ASEXUALS don’t give a F**K” amused me, but not visually.

Fortunately quite a lot did visually appeal, and I took rather a lot of pictures, and despite a few technical problems quite a lot of them came out. Enough certainly to make editing a real pain.

It had been a good night on Friday, and I probably still wasn’t fit to drive a camera – fortunately they can’t breathalyse you for it. For some reason I left the D300 on a high ISO setting for an hour or so while taking pictures, though fortunately I managed to set the D700 to something sensible. Working with two bodies, I had a Sigma 12-24 (equiv 18-36mm) – just back from repair – on the D300 and another Sigma, the 24-70 HSM on the D700. So for that time the wide-angle shots were taken at silly settings like ISO 3200.

The results were noticeably more noisy than I’d like. With the D300, I’m fairly happy working at ISO 1600 if I have to, but try to avoid anything faster. For the first time in a year or so I found the noise reduction built into Lightroom wasn’t enough and had to turn to specialist noise reduction software.

There are I think several programs worth considering to reduce noise, and when I used to seriously review software I was given free licences for all of them. But two years ago I moved to a new PC, and could no longer get them to work. Fortunately that old PC still works, and I switched it on for the first time this year to process these images.

The 3 programs that I recommended after my tests – and still recommend – are Imagenomic Noiseware Pro, Neat Image Pro and Noise Ninja, all capable of excellent results. For these pictures I actually used Noiseware, but either of the others would have given similar results. You can actually download a free ‘Noiseware Community Edition’ for non-commercial use, which gives similar results although a few options are disabled. Its main limitation – at least if you only want to work with jpegs – seems to be that it is a standalone programme rather than a Photoshop plugin.

I sent a disk of mixed files taken at normal and high ISO to a library the day after Pride (I’d already e-mailed a few) and viewing them on my 21″ screen at 15″ wide the difference in quality is only noticeable on close inspection. At 1:1 it’s a little more obvious, but not greatly so. There is just a slight difference in colour quality that I think you can see even in the web files – more pictures on My London Diary – but frankly it’s still so much better than we would have thought possible just a few years ago.

Last year I wrote very little about Pride, but of course did take pictures I did give some links to some work from earlier years.

Remember Spain

In most recent years I’ve managed to attend the annual commemoration for the British volunteers who travelled to Spain to fight against fascism in the Spanish Civil War in 1936-9. Each year fewer veterans of the war are able to attend, with only seven British veterans still surviving, all in their 90s or older. Although that is a remarkable figure, a third of the known surviving veterans from the Republican side.

Our government refused to act, even making it illegal to send aid to the legitimately elected Spanish Government that was being attacked by Franco, but over two thousand men and women from Britain, socialists and mainly communists, made their way to support Spain; over 500 dying there.

One veteran whose absence at the ceremony this year was deeply felt was Jack Jones, one of the truly great British figures of the last century as a trade unionist and activist, and former head of the International Brigade Memorial Trust. Sam Lesser, at 95 one of the younger veterans of the war, gave a moving tribute to his life.

Others who died in the past year were Bob Doyle, Bernard McKenna and Rosaleen Ross. McKenna, who came from a poverty-stricken Irish family in Manchester, had been wounded in two battles, recovering to return to the front and was then captured by the Germans and interrogated by the Gestapo. Unlike most others he was not executed but spent some time in an Italian prisoner of war camp. He was repatriated in a prisoner exchange in 1938 – and got a bill for repatriation- £4 – from the Foreign Office on his return. It was still unpaid when he died last year.

You can see more pictures from this event at the International Brigade Memorial in Jubillee Gardens on the South Bank, on My London Diary, as well as some from the events in 2007, 2006 , 2005 and 2004