>Re:PHOTO Peter Marshall - Thoughts on Photography

No Half Measures

Green campaigners demonstrated opposite Downing St on Thursday 29 April against the Government’s intention to allow the building of new coal-fired power stations with only limited carbon capture.

© 2009 Peter Marshall.
Joss Garman from Greenpeace addresses the demo
Coal is inherently the ‘dirtiest’ of fuels, releasing large quantities of carbon dioxide on burning. Current carbon capture and storage technologies can cut emissions by around 20%, still leaving a massive pollution.

Our government want to build new coal power stations despite this, promising that in 15 years time unless all the carbon can be captured they will be close. As several speakers, including Green MEP for London Jean Lambert pointed out, it is by no means certain that 100% CCS will be achievable, and almost certain that if it isn’t no government will close down these dirty power stations.

More on the demonstration on My London Diary.

WMD in London

April 28 is International Workers Memorial Day, recognised in many countries around the world. Consultations are taking place over recognition by the UK government, with construction workers union ICATT pressing for it to be made a Bank Holiday, but at the moment although WMD was observed in various places in the UK it remained rather easy to miss in London.

People do get killed at work. Many if not most are not killed by ‘accident’ but because of a deliberate flouting of safety practices. ‘Accident’ rates are higher among small firms and sub-contractors, where the financial incentive to ‘cut corners’ is higher.

The main London demonstration started at the statue of the Unknown Building Worker in the pavement by the south side of the road at Tower Hill. Unless you are catchng a bus there you are unlikely to see it as most pedestrians walk along the underpass and miss it. There were apparently great problems in finding a suitable location for this statue, but it is a shame it isn’t in a rather more prominent place – just a hundred yards or so west near Tower Terrace would be better.

Most of those taking part in the march and rally were construction workers, many in work clothes and carrying hard hats. Also present were relatives of some of those killed – there are roughly 80 such deaths a year (as well as many more who die from exposure to asbestos.)

Not far away the march stopped for a short period of silence outside a site where a worker was killed in March, before going on to the London offices of the Health and Safety Executive. HSE staff there complain about the number of inspectors being cut – and less inspections being made. There are very few prosecutions brought, and even when these are successful, penalties are often virtually negligible. We need much tougher laws, better enforcement and sensible sentences to improve safety at work.

You can read a fuller account of the march and rally with more pictures on My London Diary

Guggenheim Grants

The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has contributed greatly to photography over the years.

Ansel Adams, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Diane Arbus, Lewis Baltz, Harry Callahan, Paul Caponigro, William Christenberry, Imogen Cunningham, Roy De Carava, William Eggleston…

These are just a few of the more famous photographers who have been awarded fellowships in the past – I soon got tired with reading through the listings.

Great works like Walker Evans’s ‘American Photographs‘, Robert Frank’s ‘The Americans‘ and Edward Weston’s pictures for ‘California and the West‘ would not have been possible without them. Of course as well as names familiar to everyone, there are also those in the Guggenheim lists who are less well known – and even some of those with photography prizes who I’ve never heard of.

Photographers only form a small proportion of the over 16,000 fellows it has supported in 85 years, and, as it tells you on the State of the Art blog, 7 of the 180 fellowships this year went to photographers. You’ll find all 7 mentioned there with one of their pictures and at least in most cases a link to more work.

Many in the UK will have come across landscape photographer Thomas Joshua Cooper, Professor and Senior Researcher in Fine Art, The Glasgow School of Art. His exhibition True opened at the Haunch of Venison gallery in London last Friday (until 30 May 2009.)

Another photographer among the seven honoured who I’ve written about several times is Brian Ulrich. I’m pleased to see that his work has been recognised in this way.

Visteon Workers Win – But Fight Continues

One of the better pieces of news on May Day was that the occupation and picketing by sacked Visteon workers in Belfast, Enfield and Basildon and the strong support given by their union, Unite, has led to a greatly improved offer on severance pay, which the workers have now voted to accept.

The deal, achieved through the kind of fighting spirit I witnessed on my visits to the plant at Enfield shortly after the factory occupation started and when the workers came out of the works following a court order has been described as “ten times better” than the initial offer, with most workers getting six months or a year’s pay. The campaign also benefited from considerable support by students and trade unionists who brought supplies and joined in the pickets and demonstrations at the plant.

One of the workers from Enfield gave a powerful address at the Trade Union May Day rally in Trafalgar Square, stressing the need to stand up and fight for your rights – as these men and women did.

However, despite this victory there is still a battle to be fought over pensions, which highlights our unsatisfactory laws governing company pension schemes. Legislation is needed to ensure that money paid into these by employees and employer should be entirely separate from company accounts and not something that can be lost.

After the rally in Trafalgar Square, workers and supporters held a picket outside the offices of Visteon administrators KPMG just off Fleet Street (once of course the home of the UK Newspaper industry.) They demanded that their pension funds be restored to them.

There were speeches from several of the workers, including Raymond who had spoken earlier at Trafalgar Square, as well as one of the local Unite officials. The picket was also supported by London anarchists, including members of the London Branch of the IWW (Industrial Workers of the World), and trade unionists.

Jiro’s Café

Of course it’s only sensible that the lighting in art galleries is on the pictures, but it doesn’t make things easier when you are trying to photograph the people at an opening. There might be ways around this with some serious effort, but I hadn’t gone to the opening of Jiro Osuga‘s installation, Café Jiro, in the Flowers Gallery in Cork St, London, to take pictures, but to admire his incredible imagination and painting.

The lighting on the pictures gives a white balance at around 2300K (and around -6 magenta) so using flash to add a bit of light would really need a suitable filter to bring it from around 5600K. And there is a largish door and window at one end of the room with evening daylight at closer to 8000K. I’m travelling without my camera bag, just the D700 with a 20mm, and its built-in flash isn’t too great in any case, so though I take a few with it, most of the time I elect to work with available light at ISO 3200 and later adjust the lighting balance in Lightroom, burning the brightly lit painting on the walls and dodging the dimmer figures.

I discover you can even apply a little amber to the street outside the gallery to more or less neutralise the colour cast should you want too, but I quite like the mixed colour effect. The quality from the D700 at ISO 3200, which allows hand-held exposures at around 1/100, f3.5 in the fairly dim interior, is nothing short of amazing compared with the bad old days of film.

I’ve long been an admirer of Jiro’s work and have organised several group shows including some of his pictures, but in this show he has created something on a larger scale than before, re-creating the whole ground floor of the gallery as ‘Jiro’s Café’. The words ‘accessible’ and ‘fun’ can seldom be attached to shows in this most famous of Mayfair gallery streets in London, but this show is certainly both, and also a powerful showcase of the intelligence and vision that Jiro’s work always displays, applied to a much larger canvas, or rather series of canvases.

The large area around the room took seven months to paint in the artist’s studio, where he could only see and work on it a canvas at a time, and it must have been a considerable relief to see it altogether for the first time in the gallery when the show was hung and find it all fitted together perfectly.

My pictures concentrate on the people at the opening – and particularly on friends of mine who were there – including the artist.

A few of those in my photographs are also in the paintings, particularly the gallery staff who can be found in the kitchen. Y0u can see 19 panels on the Flowers Gallery web site
which includes most of the display except the topmost level, but you really need to get to Cork St and see it as a whole to appreciate it as an ensemble and the relationships between the parts. In the basement gallery there are also other some smaller paintings by Jiro (and some other gallery artists) in the downstairs area.

Although it contains some references to the original site for which it was designed – such as the windows on the front wall which are those of the street opposite, it is a work that would stand on its own and could be shown in galleries and museums elsewhere, and I hope others around the world will get an opportunity to see it.

At the gallery you can buy a nicely illustrated catalogue for a tenner and also a one metre long thin card showing all the paintings that make up Café Jiro at a quid, including the panels in the doorway showing a dog tied to the café’s sandwich board. In my photograph he is being photographed by his owner and his head is clearly visible on the screen of her camera in a larger image. Hidden behind her head is the painted wheel of Jiro’s bicycle.

Don’t miss it. The show continues until May 23, 2009.

30

30 – photographic show at the Shoreditch Town Hall, London, open 10-6 until 2 May 2009, is a show by 30 photography students from the University of Westminster, where ‘producing a photographic show’ was a module on their course.

You can see some of their names with an example of their work on the 30 blog, and if you are anywhere within distance I think it’s a show worth seeing, both for the impressive range of work on display, but also for the location itself.

Where else can you see a film of a bride and groom projected above a urinal, images made to fit in a room with the floor half dug up and a large brown earthenware pipe and much much more, and some of the pictures simply pinned up on decaying walls are well worth a look. This was an exhibition I really enjoyed visiting, which is more than you can say for many at more prestigious venues. It has a liveliness that makes the current offering at the Photographers’ Gallery I visited the previous day seem extremely sad.

It’s good also to see a student show with such a wide range of work, rather than some that seem to be largely a series of clones of a particular tutor or small group of tutors. There is certainly a lot of talent here, though perhaps a little depressing to reflect that with the current state of the market for photography nearly all of them will end up doing other things for a living. Of course that isn’t necessarily a bad thing and I’m sure that photography will continue to enrich the lives of many of them – and of others who will continue to enjoy their work.

Don’t put off going to see this – it ends this Saturday. Here are a few of the pictures I took of the location and the work on display.

The Grand Demonstration

There are of course no photographs of the ‘Grand Demonstration‘ organised by the Metropolitan trades unions to campaign for the release of the Tolpuddle Martyrs in 1834, although I was rather surprised that a Google search appeared to turn one up – actually a photograph of a contemporary engraving.

Trade unions had been legal for ten years at the time and the men from Tolpuddle were propelled to fame (and a very uncomfortable trip to Australia and back) only because a local landowner spotted a chance to attack trade union activites using the then current equivalent of our anti-terrorist laws, the Unlawful Oaths Act, passed in 1797 to prevent naval mutiny.

Over 100,000 marched from Copenhagen Fields (now rather reduced in size as Caledonian Park) in Islington down to Parliament carrying a petition with over 200,000 signatures, and, at least according to that engraving, wearing top hats.

Saturday’s event, backed by the TUC, was on a rather smaller scale and unfortunately had not a single top hat, though there were a number of colourful trade union banners and it was led by the fine Cuba Solidarity Salsa Band. And rather than going to Parliament and then on to Kennington Park as in those hardier times, it stopped a short way down the road at Edward Square for a festival. But although small it was still quite a grand demonstration, and the sun came out for it.

But perhaps the biggest difference between marches then and now is that the 1834 demonstration and the rest of the campaign was actually successful in getting the men released and brought back to England. The considerably larger march in 2003 (and the many other large marches and protests in London and elsewhere) against the invasion of Iraq failed to have any effect on the Blair government.

More of the story and more pictures on My London Diary.

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.