Police States – Hoo and Beijing

I’ve been in Scotland for the past couple of weeks, visiting Glasgow and Iona, and missing much of what’s been happening both actually and in the media – though I did see a few seconds of the Olympics when I walked through a lounge on a ferry near Oban.

In a previous post I wrote about the rally at Rochester and the march to the Climate Camp at Kingsnorth in Kent on August 3, but I left the march after a couple of miles to come back, make that post, then pack for Scotland. The few press reports and radio news items I heard in the next week weren’t at all informative about what was actually happening at the camp, with no mention at all of the workshops, talks and other educational events taking place, and very little about the activities of the police.

In Rochester, the police were, so far as I could see, doing what they should do, having  regard for the safety of the protesters on the march and allowing the rally and protest to proceed while also ensuring that those not involved in it could carry on with their activities with minimal disruption. While I was present, press and others photographing or reporting on the event were not impeded in any way.

Down the road and later in the week things appear to be very different, as you can see from the reports on various blogs. One of the best is Jason N Parkinson’s, with a number of reports including one with a video showing the police searching journalists – including Jason himself and Marc Vallée, who also has some powerful images.  Although some situations might justify such searches, this would not appear to be one, and the length of time for which they were detained seems totally unjustifiable and the incident seems a clear attempt by police to restrict press freedom.

For the week, this part of Kent – the Hoo Peninsula – became a police state, apparently under Section 60 of the Criminal Justice Act, which police appear to interpret as giving them the power to do “anything they like” – including – as Marina Pepper describes, for male police officers to touch her in a way that in any other circumstances would have had her “pressing charges for sexual assault and expect justice to be done.” They also confiscated her grandmother’s table cloth as an offensive weapon and then lost it.

Section 60, intended by Parliament to give police powers to deal with football hooligans or others who might be ‘tooled up’ for trouble, should only be used where there is a reasonable belief by a senior police officer of incidents involving serious violence taking place. Few actual occasions where the police have used Section 60 orders would appear to meet this condition, and the intentions of the climate campers were largely if not entirely peaceable.  Does trespass and the possibility of some damage through direct action qualify legally as ‘serious violence’? I would have hardly thought so, but then I’m not a lawyer.

Section 60 gives police the power to “stop any person or vehicle and make any search he thinks fit” whether or not he has any grounds for suspicion, and to seize articles which “he has reasonable grounds for suspecting to be an offensive weapon.” This means “anything made or adapted for use for causing injury to persons” or “intended by the person having it with him for such use by him or by some other person.” It seems highly unlikely that that there could ever be reasonable grounds for seizing a table cloth.

The police have often if not always pushed laws beyond what Parliament intended in defence of the status quo, often knowing that if and when things come to court there may be a fair trial and the case will then be thrown out or lost – as has happened frequently in recent years. Perhaps one day we will get a government that believes in freedom and attempts to rein in the force, but I’m not holding my breath.

As we have all seen, in China these things are simpler, and journalists covering the protests at the Olympics have been prevented from photographing, assaulted and in some cases detained, despite the promises of press freedom given by the authorities to obtain the Games. Among those assaulted was the Guardian’s Dan Chung, and his pictures as well as those of him being attacked are on the Guardian site along with a video of ITN News correspondent John Ray being taken away in a van. There is link to another video of the event on the  PDN Pulse site.

Incidentally Ray says he was detained by the Chinese for about 30 minutes, ten minutes less than the photographers stopped in Hoo.

Hayling Island Carnival

Just a few pictures from the Hayling Island Carnival on Saturday:


Children’s Fancy Dress Competition

Waiting for the start of the carnival parade

These were all taken by me, but I went to the carnival with three other photographers, Paul Baldesare, David Trainer and Bob Watkins, and the four of us have an exhibition in a couple of months, part of the east London ‘Photomonth‘, at the The Juggler, 5 Hoxton Market, N1 6HG in Hoxton, London from  29 Sept- 31 Oct, 2008 .

These pictures won’t be in it, as I will be showing black and white work from Notting Hill. You can get a preview of the show on the English Carnival web site.

I’ll be travelling around quite a bit in the next couple of weeks, so it may be some time before my next post to this blog, or before I have time to put more pictures from the carnival on My London Diary.

Climate Camp – Kingsnorth

Photographers – including my own union, the NUJ – have again complained about the media policy at this year’s climate camp which started today at Kingsnorth on the Isle of Grain in Kent, the proposed site of a new coal-fired power station.  Last year I decided I wasn’t prepared to work within the restrictions that the organisers had set, and only covered a little of the actions outside the camp on the final day.

This year, my reasons for not covering the camp are simpler – I have to be in Scotland while it is taking place, but I was able to photograph the ‘No New Coal’ march from Rochester to the camp, or at least the rally in Rochester and the first couple of miles of the march.


Climate Caravan arrives in Rochester from Heathrow

Rochester is certainly a historic city (or an historic one) and I think we were perhaps making history there today in an action – along with those against a third runway at Heathrow that may come to be seen as a turning point for our government – and our planet. Unless we  move beyond green rhetoric to green action now, the opportunity to save the world may be missed.

There is no such thing as clean coal. If a new coal burning station is built at Kingsnorth this single plant will add more pollution than many whole countries currently produce.  The company and our government talk about carbon capture and storage, but Kingsnorth will not incorporate these (just be ‘ready’ for them.)  It is far from certain that these technologies will ever be developed and even less likely if so that they will be economic.

The nettle that we have to grasp is that of decreasing energy use. So far we have cut emissions simply by exporting the industries we used to have to other countries. We still actually use the products of the energy, but the pollution counts against the producing countries not us.


‘No New Coal’ march sets off from Rochester

Some things would be relatively easy to cut. We could travel less, and do more of it by less polluting methods – using rail or ship rather than air, possibly developing the use of slower but more fuel-efficient methods such as airships rather than aircraft.  Increasingly better on-line communications should be cutting down the need for travel to meetings, but in fact we seem to be travelling more despite using them.

Renewable methods of power generation would cut down emissions, although we also need to cut down the use of power and also of water.  A shift to more local methods of power generation rather than increasing reliance on large power stations could have a very useful effect.

But importantly people need to be persuaded that you can live better while using less energy and less resources.


The ‘No New Coal’ march goes over the Medway towards Kingsnorth

So although I still have reservations about the media policy (and there is considerable interest from the media in the camp) I hope it will be successful. Because I’ll be away it will be rather longer than usual before more pictures appear on My London Diary.

City of Ambition – Ferit Kuyas and other shows

Yesterday I had a day of looking at pictures rather than taking them, though I couldn’t resist a few snaps later on – after too many glasses of red wine – as you can see here. Between a couple of meetings I fitted in visits to the Michael Hoppen Gallery in Chelsea and the Photographers’ Gallery near Leicester Square in an afternoon involving far too much sitting in hot buses in slow moving traffic and sweltering in the underground.

There were three shows at Michael Hoppen, but the only one I found of much interest was of work by Miroslav Tichy who I had written briefly about in 2005, around the time he won the ‘New Discovery Award’ at Arles (he first allowed his work to be shown in public in a show in Spain in 2004.) Tichy was obsessed by women, how they looked, stood, their gestures, and carried that obsession beyond normal limits, photographing through windows, the fences of swimming pools and on the streets, taking sometimes a hundred pictures a day with his handmade cameras.  Part of the charm that these pictures do possess is that they are so crudely made, but I think they are really objects that are talking points rather than photographs.  I certainly find the idea of paying 8 or 10,000 euros for one extremely curious. Yesterday was the last day of the show, but if you missed it I don’t think you missed a great deal. You can read the story on the web site (and elsewhere) and that’s what this is all about.

The Photographers’ Gallery has a show that clearly demonstrates how much better fashion photography used to be. I never thought I would walk around a show and decide that the most interesting picture was by Helmut Newton (there is a nice Irvin Penn and a quite a few others of interest.)  But frankly I don’t think any of the more current big names in the show stand up to the earlier competition and printing them big just makes them seem more vacuous.  Fashion in the Mirror continues until 14 Sept 2008.

Outside the gallery
It was cooler on the street outside Photofusion

In several ways my most rewarding gallery visit was to Photofusion in Brixton, where Turkish-born Ferit Kuyas’s City of Ambition was having its private view.  The city in question is Chongqingin, China, whose 32 million inhabitants include the family of the photographer’s wife. The large colour prints made from his 4×5 images are mainly from the outskirts of the city, showing areas of rapid growth through the haze of pollution that appears to cover most of the country (and will possibly lead to the cancellation of the Olympic marathon in Beijing.)

Ferit Kuyas
Ferit Kuyas (centre) at the opening

You can see some excellent images of his work from the project on his web site, along with some other projects worth looking at. ‘Agglosuisse‘ is a collection of colour images of “mediocre suburban spaces” that I really like, while the black and white images in ‘Archetypes‘ show more of his sense of design. You can also read more about him in a feature in the Hasselblad Masters Archive.

Down the pub
Brixton – band in pub

My evening finished at a pub a short walk away, before a rather long wait for the bus to take me to Clapham Junction for the train home.  It’s a pain that the Victoria line closes at 10.00pm – these works seem to be dragging on for ever.

Evans, Photography and Beaches

James R Mellor wrote the exhaustive biography of Walker Evans, a remarkable book (ISBN 046509077x) unfortunately not quite finished before Mellor’s death in 1997, and a book I recommend to all.  The final section of the final chapter that he completed is about the relationship between Evans and Frank and I think had he lived he would have explored more fully some of the questions this section raises.

In it, Mellor quotes (p553) from the wall label written by Evans for his nine pictures in a show containing work by him, Manuel Alvarez Bravo and August Sander presented by Edward Steichen at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, ‘Diogenes with a Camera III‘ in January 1956. (Other shows in this series of five from 1952-1961 included work by Edward Weston, Frederick Sommer, Harry Callahan, Eliot Porter, Gene Smith, Paul Strand, Shirley C Burden, Esther Bubley, Man Ray, Todd Webb, Tosh Matsumoto, Lucien Clergue, Yasuhiro Ishimoto…)

Diogenes was of course a seeker after truth who rejected social norms, lived on the streets in a barrel on a diet of onions and was the great cynic, debunking the values and institutions of his times. Certainly he was a very “minded” guy who made himself a “King of the Street” – and it was a few words with John Benton-Harris that set my mind wandering after a quotation from Walker Evans.

Tod Papageorge in his thought-provoking essay ‘Walker Evans and Robert Frank: An essay on Influence‘ written in 1981 (Yale University Art Gallery, ISBN 0894670158, text now available in The Missing Criticism series, which republishes out-of-print writing on photography) had earlier quoted this label in its entirety as a footnote on page 3:

“Valid photography, like humor, seems to be too serious a matter to talk about seriously. If, in a note, it can’t be defined weightily, what it is not can be stated with the utmost finality. It is not the image of Secretary Dulles descending from a plane. It is not cute cats, nor touchdowns, nor nudes; motherhood; arrangements of manufacturers’ products. Under no circumstances is it anything ever anywhere near a beach. In short it is not a lie – a cliché – somebody else’s idea. It is prime vision combined with quality of feeling, no less.”

(I was pleased I could still find my copy of Papageorge’s book – secondhand it now sells for around $2-400, and althoughit is good to see the text republished on the web,  without the images referred to by bracketed numbers throughout the text the reader has a certain amount of detective work to do. Mellor’s biography is a real bargain second-hand – unless you can find it locally you are likely to pay more for postage than the book – and there are many, many more pages to read.)

Perhaps “under no circumstances is it anything ever anywhere near a beach”  is worth bearing in mind for the holiday season (although of course it was aimed directly towards Edward Weston.)  When there are rather fewer (if any) posts from me over the coming few weeks at least you will know not to expect a deluge of beach images on my return.

Kings of the Street

John Benton-Harris looks at:

Henri Cartier-Bresson & Helen Levitt, ‘Side By Side‘
Laurence Miller Gallery,  20 West 57th Street, New York
(5 June to 14 August, 2008)

All things being equal (which they never are,) we who use photography to communicate should be encouraged to be courageous, minded and to speak from the heart, even while working to fill our pockets – as it once was in America. But the commercial world has become smaller, narrower, dumber, as well as much greedier, particularly in recent years.And as an American, who has resided here in England as long as I have, I pine the loss of more mature and optimistic times in a place where anything was possible as long as  we made the effort to work towards it.

And that’s the most honest declaration I can provide others with as to why I still return to New York once or twice yearly, but continuing  to speak frankly, it’s to protect and fan that flame that still is in me to stay alight and grow. And also because here in “Never Never Land”, the UK, there is no home-grown history of serious individual expression or mature leadership, that could spark such a light.   Here we merely continue to produce a glut of ambitious photographers, but not a surplus of talented ones. This will continue to be the case as long as  photography is controlled by a disconnected leadership at the very conservative centre of English life.

That is why New York – and  more particularly Paris today – are regarded jointly and deservedly as the ‘Home Offices’ of this medium. In fact the French have overtaken us Yanks in their celebration of visual expression, through and with photography. Through doing so much more to expand interest, understanding, opportunity and access, with its introduction of major city and regional festivals that are given over to this discipline.

Now you might be wondering what has all this to do with Henri Cartier-Bresson and Helen Levitt. Well they are the two significant talents that immediately come to mind signifying that personal commitment in these twin visual cultures on a personal level. And although very different people with very different outlooks, overviews, approach modes and subjects, none the less they were both committed to their personal understanding of excellence.

One travelled the world to catch views of people and life that concentrated more on defining his sense of timing, sensitivity, and eloquence. The other’s eye being a motherly one mostly watched over neighbourhood life, with a particular fondness for children at play and the elderly with time on their hands. And speaking of Time, they were both equally obsessed with shaping it, catching it, saving it, and presenting it, all together in ways that capture our attention, our appreciation, and our wonderment.

Helen and Hank (excuse the familiarity) are not just good friends, they are in their very different ways, life long influences; for one’s emotional warmth and sensitivity is as important as the other’s structuring and timing. Helen in her later years moved a little further out from her immediate neighbourhood and added additional information of another colour to her New York visual symphony that gained her an even larger and more appreciative audience. While Hank, hankering to be what he had already achieved, “An Artist” in his own right and place, took himself out from behind his camera. But quite apart from these late-life alterations, both still remain; put simply “Kings of the Street”.

In closing I feel no need to attempt to describe in words what is meant for eyes to digest, all I will say to those who know nothing of them, is that they are in for a very special treat. And for them that do, this presentation is chock full of premium works.

© John Benton-Harris – July 30th 2008

Selected Web Links

Lawrence Miller Gallery: Side By Side
Helen Levitt:  New York Streets  1938 to 1990s
Henri Cartier-Bresson: Magnum
Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson

Picture Paradise?

Some years ago when I wrote a feature for a web site on the early years of photography in  Australia (Australian Photography 1840-60)  and another on a fine twentieth-century Australian photographer, Frank Hurley, unfortunately neither currently available on line.

After publishing my piece on the early years, I received an e-mail from an Australian that berated me for not having written a full history of photography in that country. My reply basically but politely told him that I was a pom living in England, and if he wanted a history of photography in his country he should get off his backside, do some research and write it. A few years ago there was relatively little material available on line to enable me to do so if I had wanted to, and so far as I was concerned Australia was just one of around 195 countries I wanted to write about.  (Unfortunately this was 194 more than my then employers appreciated, and I only managed to mention something about photography in around 50 of these before they dispensed with my services.)

I don’t know how many of the pioneers I mentioned – Captain Lucas, George Barron Goodman, Douglas Thomas Kilburn, William Little, Norman and Heseltine, Schohl, Thomas Gill, ‘Professor’ Robert Hall, J W Newland, William Freeman, John Hunter Kerr, Robert Hunt and others – are included in what looks like a fine exhibition by the National Gallery of Australia, ‘Picture Paradise – Asia-Pacific Photography 1840s-1940s, but only Kilburn from that list appears in the 5 images on line covering the same period.

The show perhaps spreads it’s net too wide by including the Indian subcontinent – I wrote at around a dozen full-length features on India while only scratching the subject, as so many fine photographers from Britain in particular worked there in Victorian times.

It certainly is surprising not to see a single picture by the great early Indian photographer Lala Deen Dayal although he does get a mention in the accompanying essay. Several other photographers I’ve also previously written about, including Felix Beato and Samuel Bourne are represented by photographs, as too –  rather surprisingly, is Julia Margaret Cameron. Although a great photographer, the picture included serves to confirm the popular view that she did nothing of great photographic interest in her return to India, with all of her best work being made on the Isle of Wight, well outside the area of this show.

Lala Deen Dayal (1844-1905) is one of relatively few photographers to have been honoured by a postage stamp issue, and I was very pleased to receive a commemorative album from his great granddaughter who runs the web site about his work containing examples of the 500 Rupee stamp issued in November 2006. Few photographers can claim an edition of 0.4 million!

So although this is an interesting site and well worth a look, and does bring to our notice several photographers whose work until now has been (perhaps deservedly) fairly obscure, it isn’t really a balanced overall survey of photography in the region, and certainly fails to do Australia itself justice.  There is still time for that gentleman I corresponded briefly with to get his act together.

An Increasing List

I don’t know if it’s some kind of medical condition, perhaps a harbinger of oncoming senility, but I’m developing an increasing list.

Not an ever longer chronicle of those who, come the revolution will be lined up against the wall though my weekend stroll though the deepest home counties might well have prompted that.  Nor even a more and more lopsided walk due to the weight of my camera bag on my left shoulder – always my left shoulder as I collapse in pain after a just a few minutes with it on my right. It’s perhaps strange that with the coming of digital its weight has grown considerably from the more carefree past of film, when the heaviest item in the bag was a bottle of water or in winter a flask of coffee. Who would have thought all those electrons could be so heavy?

Somehow in the old days I seldom needed a flash unit or all those large spare batteries and (though I don’t often carry it) a notebook computer. Spare batteries back then were a couple about the size of a 20p piece that I changed every year on my birthday whether they needed it or no.

No, my problem is that none of my pictures are upright any more. Verticals ain’t vertical and rivers and oceans pour out from right or left frame. While a ‘dynamic composition’ may often be appropriate (as we very clearly learnt from Garry Winogrand) for demonstrations and street photography , it doesn’t always look too fine in landscapes and architecture.

One of the few possibly useful features found in the Nikon D3 lacked by the D300 is an ‘virtual horizon‘ or camera level that can be displayed at the right edge of the image in the viewfinder. Possibly it might solve my problem, but only at the expense of the camera’s weight crippling me over a long day’s work.  Of course the recently announced and lighter D700 has it too…

Incidentally, for a rather different set of pictures taken with the D700, take a look at Jim Reed’s gallery – Nikon lent him a pre-production camera early in April and he used it for a hundred days of chasing storms – there is rather scary image of him running towards a tornado holding it on the page where he writes about the camera giving it an excellent rating for durability and weather-resistance. Storm-chasing isn’t an area of photography I’ve ever felt drawn to, but I did find some impressive examples as well as a wealth of excellent advice on both techniques – such as how to photograph lightning – and also some very important safety information when I wrote a feature a few years ago.

What the D300 does have is the ability  (Custom setting d2) to project a rectangular grid on the viewfinder display. This is something I’ve avoided using, finding it too obtrusive as it flashes up in bright red when you autofocus. But now I’ve turned it on – and added it to ‘My Menu‘ so I can quickly turn it off when it gets really up my nose. It really is useful to be able to list just those things you want to access while shooting on that My Menu page so that they are there at the press of the menu button.

For years I walked around with a shift lens on the camera, getting things straight and even largely managing to avoid convergence when I wanted or needed to tilt the camera, though it’s main purpose was to allow me to stand in the right place and get the perspective I wanted. I don’t have one for the digital body, and my work has changed so I seldom miss it. With this lens, my favourite viewfinder screen in all my Olympus bodies (two OM4, OM2 and OM1) was a ruled one, finer and with a better thought-out layout than the Nikon version.  It also worked so well with other lenses that I very seldom bothered to change it. Funnily enough the Olympus one didn’t flash red and you could focus manually and precisely on the screen. Sometimes progress seems to go backwards.

Of course it’s easy enough to correct a list. In the darkroom we came to do it almost without thinking when needed, rotating the easel slightly to make the print straight. For digital it’s just as quick in Lightroom, pressing R to change to the crop/rotate screen, dragging the image as required, then D (or R) to return to develop mode.

If you use Photoshop (at least in version 7) it is a little slower still, but perhaps easier to get absolutely right. Change to the measure tool (it’s an alternative to the eye-dropper) and click to mark two ends of a line that should be either horizontal or vertical; then go to the image menu, choose Rotate Canvas, Arbitrary…, and click on OK. Then crop away all the extra background colour the rotate has added. You can just drag a marquee over the area you want to retain using the crop tool and double click, but I usually prefer to drag guides from the rulers (Ctrl R if they aren’t visible) to mark the 4 edges, then, when I’m happy these are in the correct place, use either the crop tool or the rectangular marquee (with ‘Snap to Guides‘ set in the View menu), finally using View, Clear guides. It is a bit fussier, but that way you know exactly what you are doing, and I find it  is rather easy not to get it quite right with the crop tool.

All this – even in Lightroom – does slow things down, and if like me you usually crop tightly in the viewfinder, presents a problem as the rotation results in a need for further cropping of the image.  So it’s better to get the tilt exactly how you want it in camera. Better still if you don’t need a gadget like the virtual horizon to do so.

Hyena Men

Last Sunday’s Observer had an interesting piece about Pieter Hugo, the South African photographer born in Cape Town in 1976 who won the Discovery Award at Arles announced a few days ago for his pictures of the Hyena Men. It’s a piece worth reading for his stories about his experiences while taking the pictures and what it tells you about how he works. Its a piece that ends with a quotation from Elisabeth Biondi of the ‘New Yorker‘: “He has a vision and he pursues it relentlessly“.

For me the pictures on his site are from Rwanda and Messina/Musina are more interesting (perhaps because they work better on a small scale), but given the other pictures that were around this year at Arles it isn’t hard to see why apparently everyone there was talking about his work – and that it won the prize, which is awarded on a popular vote.

You can also now read more about the festival on the FOTO8 site, including more pictures by George Georgiou. And don’t forget to get busy shooting those pictures of ‘8’s for the 888 Millennium Competition – you need to send them by August 3. You can see some of the entries already on Flickr.

A Bitter Birthday

Yesterday was my elder son’s 32nd birthday, but he wasn’t at home – I expect to see him later today when he comes back home. But yesterday I went to another birthday party, for a young man exactly two years younger than my son. His family, a few miles away in London,  haven’t seen him since 2002 and may never see him again.

Fair Tiral?

Binyam Mohamed, born in Ethiopia but lived in London and was given refugee status in 1994 was in Afghanistan in 2002 and fled across the border to Pakistan when the fighting started . There he was kidnapped and handed over to the CIA becoming one of the many subject to “illegal rendition”. First they flew him to Morocco, where he was tortured for 18 months. At times he was shackled in excruciatingly painful positions, sometimes hanging, for hours or days in darkness, unable to move to relieve the pain, often with headphones blasting music at ear-splitting volume into his head. Other abuses included regular razor cuts to his genitals. The torture continued at Kabul’s ‘Dark Prison’ where he was rendered next, before going on to Guantanamo. You can read more about his treatment on the Reprieve website, at the National Guantanamo Coalition or on You Tube (and related videos there.)

The US now intend to put Binyam in front of a military tribunal, calling for the death penalty. The “evidence” was produced during his torture and none would be admissible in any proper court.

The London Guantánamo Campaign had organised a six day vigil at the US embassy calling for Binyam’s release and return home, which culminated in a protest party on Whitehall, urging our Government to do more to get the US to release him. I hope that Gordon will talk to Obama about it too when they meet tonight.  Earlier this year I photographed a day of demonstrations in London on the 6th anniversary of the setting up of the illegal prison camp at Guantánamo, with events organised  by Amnesty,  the London Guantánamo Campaign, London Catholic Workers and ending with a rally in Parliament Square by Cageprisoners / Guantánamo Campaign, at which Binyam’s case was raised.

As I walked away I felt for Binyam and for his family. When I see my son tonight I’ll remember them again.