>Re:PHOTO Peter Marshall - Thoughts on Photography

Railway Lands: Angela Inglis

I was pleased I made the effort to attend the launch of Angela Inglis’s book ‘Railway Lands‘ last week.

Railway Lands
Matador Press/Troubador Publishing, November 2007,
ISBN-10: 1906221405 ISBN-13: 978-1906221409.

Strolling to Old St Pancras Church down Crowndale Street from Mornington Crescent, past the Working Mens’ College I relived some old memories. Many years ago my student card there saved me more on photographic materials than the cost of the evening class. Out of habit I turned to wander into the old burial ground, then remembered it was no longer the place it used to be, derelict, gloomy, foreboding, and at its best in rain and fog, but now a tidy and ultimately depressing garden, and kept straight on for the church, also considerably restored and now bright and cheerful and full of people.

Inglis’s photographs (see her web site) were arranged on the shelving around the body of the church and included some fine large prints, but they were rather hard to see for the bodies, many seated on hard church chairs perusing copies of her book just purchased. It was certainly a volume that seemed to arouse some intense local interest, and this was not surprising.

Local archivist Malcolm Holmes gave the book an enthusiastic welcome, in particular because it dispelled some local myths as well as recording the developments. Holmes was an appropriate choice, with a considerable amount of the information in the book from the borough archives for which he worked, but also because essentially this is a work firmly bound in local history and a pictorial view of the area.

My own approach to the area, perhaps since I do not live locally, has been more concerned with the wider political and environmental issues the development raises, as well as from a long interest in industrial archaeology. I was involved in the early years of the Kings Cross Railway Lands Group http://www.kxrlg.org.uk/group/history.htm set up to oppose the development plans in 1987 which published its award-winning ‘Towards a People’s Plan’ in 1990, and have followed with interest the political and legal developments over the years, although from a distance.

In 1989 I was fortunate to tour and photograph parts of the railway lands site in a GLIAS (The Greater London Industrial Archaeology Society ) group led by Malcolm Tucker, who wrote the section on Industrial Archaeology for the London 4: North volume of ‘The Buildings of England‘ that deals with this area. It was good to see him again at the book launch, along with others from GLIAS, which has done much to raise the general awareness of the importance of understanding and preserving our industrial heritage including not least the gas holders and railway infrastructure of this area, and who could have provided some rather more authoritative input on these aspects than the magazine article quoted in the volume.

Obsession is always a good thing in photography, and I can only applaud Angela Inglis for her decision to photograph the area and her dedication to the task over a number of years. Her extensive coverage the book has over 250 pages packed with pictures, but presumably is only the iceberg-tip of her archive appears to have started around the year 2000 (a few earlier images generally appear more ‘arty’ than documentary) and continues until April 2007.

She writes When the plans were submitted for the building of the new terminal at St Pancras Station for the Channel Tunnel Rail Link, I foresaw the loss of much of this landscape and photographed it urgently. Its buildings are architecturally interesting: some are gems; they represent a proud and innovative past.

Of course many had previously photographed the area and particularly its gems and there is some fine work from the 1920s and 1930s. A chug through my own database tells me I first took pictures in the area in 1978, and rather more when it became clear in the mid-80s that extensive redevelopment was bound to take place.

When I came, there were indeed some streets in the area where it seemed rare to walk and not see a film crew at work or a photography student practising architectural photography skills with a view camera on a tripod. But what is particularly valuable about Inglis’s work are the images of many often overlooked details and in particular those that show not how it used to be, but the area in transition, the record of its destruction and redevelopment.

Some images particularly appeal to me, including a splendidly busy panorama of the building site at St Pancras from near the old church, taken in October 2004, and, almost the final image in the book, a faded Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers dancing on the wall of Stanley Buildings North (now demolished). This mural was much loved over the years by locals and photographers (and I sold a print of it to the National Building Record in the 90s.)

As a book, I feel this would have benefited from a stern editor. Photographers are not always the best editors of their own work (as most of my own projects demonstrate), nor are writers and poets, and Inglis performs in all roles in this volume. However she is to be greatly applauded for this book represents a major investment in both time and money.

A few of the images do seem let down by the printing. Some of the later pictures in particular seem a bit muddy, and others such as the view of Kings Cross from Camden Council offices and Pancras Road and railway bridge, May 2000 noticeably lack sharpness; at least one (p18-19) seems to have been printed from a screen layout file rather than one at print resolution.

The book has two useful fold-out maps of the area in 1999 and 2005 at front and rear, but I did at times feel that the design, particularly the handling of text, was a little lacklustre. Overall however the production is certainly better than most works of local history.

The book also has some surprising omissions. There is very little coverage of the part of the site to the north of the canal, and both the Granary, one of the finest buildings in the area, and the Eastern Coal Drops are entirely absent, but the book remains a valuable visual record of an important area in a time of considerable change, and is a volume that anyone with an interest in the Kings Cross/St Pancras area will want.

Although the publication date is listed as November 14, you can pre-order this book from Amazon now at roughly two thirds of the RRP of £30.00

Peter Marshall

A Leading Photographer?

Like many photographers around the world, I’ve been following the story of the late Joe ODonnell with some interest. If you’ve been on Mars or Venus, O’Donnell died at the age of 85 on Aug 9, and on Aug 14 the ‘New York Times’ published an obit under the heading “Joe O’Donnell, 85, Dies; Long a Leading Photographer.” Unfortunately, the two pictures included were taken by other photographers and much of the information within the article was incorrect. Similar obits appeared elsewhere, many relying on the NYT as their source.

I have to declare a particular schadenfreude at these events. As attentive readers will know, I wrote the ‘About Photography‘ site for almost exactly eight years until May 2007, establishing it as a major on-line resource on photography and for photographers, in particular dealing with the history of photography, with hundreds of short features and a considerable number of longer essays on leading photographers among the content.

After ‘About.com‘ was bought by the New York Times for a ridiculous number of millions (not that I saw a penny of it), new management came in, photography as we know it was out of fashion, and eventually I was out of a job. The suits decided there was more money in catering solely for beginners, and the presence of more advanced material (I also had plenty of good advice for new photographers) was deemed an off-putting ‘user experience.’

Not of course that the NYT would have dreamed of asking me for advice even when I was on the payroll, although in this case a single e-mail to me or indeed to almost anyone else in the photographic world could have prevented their gaffe.

The real scandal of this event is that the NYT obviously has no-one on their staff who knows that much about photography – or cares about it. Or even worse, since apparently from their ‘explanation’ published on September 16, both the writer and the night photo editor had certain doubts about aspects of the feature, that the NYT is happy to publish material it knows is questionable.

Even had it all been correct, the headline would have been more hype than reality – if he were a leading photographer we would all have known his name.

Stories and confusion

We know many photographers (if not all) like to tell a good story, and seldom let the exact facts get in the way, though often there may be a kernel of truth. One of the greatest of all story-tellers was of course Robert Capa (who even invented himself and was a great photographer), but at least Capa knew which pictures he had taken.

O’Donnell in many cases probably didn’t, even at the time, and certainly not in the 1990s. He worked for 20 years for the United States Information Agency, and in those days photographers were largely anonymous. At some of the events he photographed there would be a whole crowd of photographers standing more or less in the same place and often taking more or less the same pictures. Films from a number of photographers were often developed together and it wasn’t that unusual for there to be disputes about who took which picture.

From around 1994, O’Donnell had suffered increasingly from dementia, and it seems likely that he actually believed the images were taken by him – and he copyrighted and tried to sell them. From some of the interviews he gave he obviously suffered from delusions. The fullest, most carefully researched – and most sympathetic account of the whole case I’ve so far seen is on the NPPA website.

John-John’s Salute

One of the pictures falsely attributed to him was a Stan Stearns image of the young John-John Kennedy making a salute at his father’s funeral. There were 70 photographers present, all crammed into a small pen at some distance from the family. Although it has sometimes been said than Stearns was the only photographer to catch this moment, this was not the case – and it was of course also seen on TV. At least 4 of the other photographers took very similar pictures; what made his famous – as the NPPA feature makes clear – was an astute picture editor, Ted Majeski of UPI, who took a very small section – less than a twentieth of the frame – and put that on the wire as a separate image of the boy’s salute.

For the remaining 65 or so in the pen, this would have been an obvious opportunity not to be missed, although some may have had their view blocked by a marine. As yet it hasn’t been established whether O’Donnell was even present, but if so, he may well have take a similar image. What is certain is that neither he nor the USIA realised the potential of a cropped version at the time.

Hiroshima & Nagasaki

O’Donnell did apparently take some rather remarkable images as a young man in Japan, visiting Hiroshima and Nagasaki while he was in the Marines as a photographer. He took two cameras with him, shooting on one for official use and keeping the pictures from the other for himself. He smuggled the films back to the US hidden in a photographic paper box and the family still have negatives and contact sheets.

Many years later O’Donnell became an anti-nuclear activist, and brought out his old pictures to show the horrors of nuclear warfare. The Smithsonian Institute planned to show some in 1994, but gave way to pressure from veterans groups who claimed they were too sympathetic to the Japanese – they were later published as ‘Japan 1945: A US Marine’s Photographs from Ground Zero (2005). Even among this work there was one image he claimed that was taken by someone else.

Japanese photographer Shigeo Hayashi had shot a panorama from a rooftop in October 1945. The print was confiscated by the US Authorities at the time, and probably ended up in the US National Archives. O’Donnell visited there in the early 1990s and is suspected of having stolen a number of unaccredited prints that he believed he had taken – probably also including those by other photographers which were shown as his work.

Moral Rights

The whole story I think stresses the importance of photographers moral rights, almost entirely unheard of in the 1940s and 50s, and still often denied. Look at any British newspaper and you will almost certainly find most of the photographs are uncredited; even more annoyingly, images where the photographer is certainly known are often simply credited to an agency. Attribution should be made legally enforcable, with publications that print images where the photographer is not credited being required to publish a correction where it can be established who took them.

Copyright

There are also issues of copyright in this case. O’Donnell claimed copyright on the images that he thought he had taken, presumably through registration at the US Copyright Office (what a shame that it still exists, despite Berne.)

Even if the pictures were actually his, images taken by employees in the course of their work for the government are not eligible for US Copyright. This appears to have escaped the notice of O’Donnell and the Copyright Office, just as it also seems often to do so for some of the mega-agencies, (and they also claim copyright on many images where it has long expired.)

Unlike O’Donnell, they cannot claim the excuse of dementia, and unlike them, there is little evidence that O’Donnell every made much if any money from his copyright fraud.

Peter Marshall

Not A1 at Lloyds

When the idea of Open House days first came up I thought it was a great one, and in the first couple of years I went into quite a few places otherwise inaccessible to the public, and even took a few pictures, although photography wasn’t always allowed. Now it has perhaps become too popular, and except for those locations where you need to book in advance (and where places tend to fill very rapidly) there are often extremely large queues.

One of the longest queues this year was at the Lloyd’s building, and the London Citizen Workers took advantage of the event to hold a demonstration. Cleaners at Lloyd’s – whose members are among the wealthiest people in the country – are some of the lowest paid in the capital, and the contract firm that employs them apparently provides no sickness pay or other benefits. They have so far resisted the campaign by the LCWA for a ‘London living wage’ for cleaners, which demands £7.20 an hour, along with entitlement to sick pay, holidays and access to a recognized trade union.

It was a small but vociferous demonstration, and some of those queuing expressed surprise at the poor treatment of the people who keep the Lloyd’s building clean. The Living Wage campaign reveals the poor treatment of essential workers, who are trapped in a ‘working poverty gap.’

Technically it was an interesting but difficult job. More film and megabytes have been used on the Lloyd’s building than any other modern building in London, and its shining silver surfaces have a definite appeal to photographers. The red banners and tabards of the demonstrators added some exciting colour, and the strong sunlight coming down the street some powerful lighting effects. But although visually stimulating, it was murder to photograph, with contrast hitting the extremes.

Picket at Lloyd's London

At least with digital you get a clear view of the problems you are facing, although in this case they were not entirely soluble. Although flash fill can bring up the foreground, it could not deal with the lower floors of the building which were in deep shade while the upper levels were in bright sun. A few years back I would have shot this kind of thing on black and white without fill (as a colleague was still doing with his Leica and doubtless getting great pictures) and probably cursed on location my inability to take wider images, and back in the darkroom cursed the empty shadows and dense highlights.

More pictures on ‘My London Diary‘.

Peter Marshall

Not Another Drop

Saturday I photographed a demonstration at which the police could not have been more helpful. Perhaps hardly surprising, since they were a part of the ‘Not Another Drop‘ campaign started in 2001 by the Community Safety Partnership uniting the Met and Brent Council. The annual Peace March – this was the fourth – was founded by Patsy Hopwood, whose student son, Kavian Francis-Hopwood was shot dead on the Stonebridge Estate in 2003 – still an unsolved crime.

Supporting the march were several local church groups (including a Brazilian congregation from the area) and families of several of the many young people who have met similar violent deaths in Brent in recent years, many of whom were shown on posters carried in the march. Although obviously the aims of the march can only be applauded, it was perhaps disappointing not to see greater support from the various communities in the area, with only around 250 gathering for the start of the march at Stonebridge, although more were expected for the rally at the end of the event in South Kilburn.

One of the trickier parts of the event for the half-dozen or so photographers present was the release of white doves shortly before the march started. I’m still not quite sure whether to rely on my reflexes or the 5 fps mode of the D200 to try to catch the peak moment. What I actually did was to try to catch the moment and then hold my finger down to get the next few frames at 5 fps. In fact the second exposure turned out to be the best, but I was left wishing I had one slightly earlier – and perhaps slightly later. It’s one of the few situations where I’d really like to have the 9fps that Nikon promise us for the D3 due later this year.

More pictures from the event on My London Diary.

Lewisham 1977

I wasn’t at the battle of Lewisham in August 1977. For some reason I was away from London and so missed the events that took place. One of the best account of them – and some great images – is in the issue of Camerawork about the event, and it’s worth getting hold of a copy if you can. You can also read a great deal of detail – along with pictures and video etc – on the Lewisham77 web site.

Briefly, the fascist National Front tried to march from New Cross through the centre of Lewisham. Local people and socialists from all over London and further afield came to stop them – just as the East End had stopped Mosley in Cable Street in 1936.

The NF were demoralized and defeated – and so were the police. After the NF had been sent packing, the police turned on the socialists with unprecedented brutality – particularly be the Special Patrol Group. But the demonstrators fought back and with the youth of Lewisham, largely black, defeated the police.

There were many arrests, and it was the first time that British police used riot shields outside of Ireland. Lewisham Police station was partly trashed, and was later replaced by a new fortress, said to be the largest police station in Europe.

Batwinder Rana talks about the Battle of Lewisham in Lewisham High Street.

Last Saturday, as a part of ‘Lewisham’77’, a series of events organised by local historians and activists supported by the Centre for Urban and Community Research at Goldsmiths University of London and other groups held a commemorative walk from Clifton Rise in New Cross to Lewisham High Street, with some of those who were present recounting their experiences at key sites along the route. If you were there, Lewisham77 would like to record your memories of the event for a DVD and publication. Since it is now over 30 years after the event, you apparently no longer have to be afraid about revealing any illegal actions!

More pictures from the commemoration on My London Diary.

Keeping Clean

Not personal hygiene, but camera hygiene. Photographers in general haven’t a great reputation for the first, and probably the more arty you aspire the longer and more tangled your beard, except, possibly, if you are a woman. And photojournalists can often find themselves in places where baths and showers are in short supply. Lee Miller and David Scherman even had to borrow Hitler’s in Munich

Digital seems to bring more problems in keeping cameras clean. Not just sensors, but also lenses seem to me to be more affected by dust, fingermarks and more. Perhaps its because we are getting used to a cleaner result with digital and there is no grain to disguise defects. With film we pick up the crap after the event (I’ve just spent what seems like hours cleaning a few scans) but with digital its what gets on when we take them that matters.

With lenses the solution is easy. I didn’t believe it when I went on an internet photo radio and the presenter spent half the programme plugging the ‘Lens Pen’ but it is really a rather neat solution, although they do fall to pieces after a few months of use they are still worth the money. Just a shame that 7 day shop no longer seem to stock them, but even at the RRP of £8.99 they are worth the money. Fast, easy to use, efficient. Who could ask for anything more?

Cleaning sensors is a little trickier. Start by buying a really good (i.e. big) ‘Hurricane‘, ‘Rocket‘ or similar air blower – a big black rubber bulb with a valve at one end and a red plastic tube with a small hole. I got mine from Jessops for a fiver, though they no longer seem to list them, but other photo dealers will have them. These last for around a year or two if you are lucky before the rubber will start to crumble and give dust.

Air blowers are safer than aerosols on your sensor, better for the environment – even the so-called ‘green’ aerosols damage it severely and don’t run out when you need them. They also seem to be as effective. I’ve got into the habit of using mine every day before I go out, it takes half a minute to remove the lens, blow out the mirror box a few times, raise the mirror and give the sensor a few thorough blasts, then replace the lens and put the mirror down (don’t leave it up, as on some cameras this runs the battery down.)

Blowing doesn’t remove stuck dirt, but this daily ritual has significantly cut down the amount of proper cleaning I’ve had to do. I fire a test shot – my fridge door exposed out of focus with the lens at the smallest aperture and wide-angle and moving the camera to prevent any of the dirt from the door making an image. Then I zoom in to the exposed image and check for any spots.

Stage 2 cleaning involves the use of a brush. I bought a genuine and expensive ‘Sensor Brush’ but I’m told any suitably sized brush will do, so long as you clean it very carefully to remove any size before initial use. Petteri Sulonen has a great feature that tells you how to choose a brush, clean it and test it, along with many other tips on sensor cleaning.

Keep the brush in a suitable container that keeps it pristine, such as a sealed box or plastic bag. It will need washing occasionally too. To use it requires a little common sense and care. The brush shifts dirt when you brush the sensor, but you also want it to pick dirt up. You also need to work on a clean surface in a reasonably dust-free room – I find my kitchen a suitable place, and avoid wearing clothes that produce fluff or dust. Always start by using the blower as above before turning to the brush.

Sulonen recommends striking the brush against the flat edge of a kitchen knife to clean it before use. I use half a dozen puffs from the blower brush to blow it out (away from the camera of course.) Then a single pass of the brush to lift dirt, clean the brush, another pass… Repeat this perhaps half a dozen times, then put the mirror down, replace the lens and take another shot to check the image is clean.

If there is still dirt on the sensor after repeating the brushing process a few times, then you need to consider wet cleaning. Roughly following the ‘Copperhill‘ method, I made a support for my home-made swabs from the handle of an old toothbrush and an old credit-card style pass. I cut a slot in the end of the handle to fit the card, cut a strip from the card just slightly less wide than my sensor, rounded its corners slightly, carefully cleaned the edges and pushed it into the handle.

Working again under clean conditions, I fold a clean Pec-Pad lint-free non-abrasive tissue around the card to form a swab (put the end half way across, fold the bottom up, then fold left and right sides over, secure with sticky tape – see photo.) Add one drop (or at most 2) of superfine clean Eclipse methanol, place the tip of the swab at one edge of the sensor, pushing just hard enough to flex the card very slightly and thus ensure good contact. Wipe the sensor from there to the other edge slowly and firmly with the swab leaning slightly forward, pick it up and go back in the opposite direction – you will be using the other side of the swab. Discard the swab, leave the camera (sensor pointing down so as not to collect dust) for around 30s to ensure any residual methanol has evaporated, refit the lens and test as before. If there are still dust spots, repeat. The swab and methanol cost around 10p, rather cheaper and I think at least as effective as any of the commercial products I’ve tried.

A single swabbing won’t always remove all dirt – either with a homemade swab or commercial ones. Occasionally I’ve had to use 3 or 4 before I was satisfied. At 10p a time it isn’t a problem, but using commercial swabs at £4 or so a time, costs soon mount.

Of course even that is cheap compared to taking your camera to a repairer for cleaning (and costs there can mount if the dust is hard to clear.) The other good reason for doing it yourself is the great time saving – no travel and no waiting until a technician is available – or leaving your camera to collect later.

Disclaimer

Although I’ve yet to hear of anyone having problems from using this method, it is always possible, and you follow any of these suggestions entirely at your own risk.

Teamphoto at the Gym

Im not sure when the Turnhalle or German Gymnasium at the back of Kings Cross lost its national epithet. The building itself has received a considerable makeover during the recent and continuing rebuilding of the area, looking as clean and shiny as it doubtless did in 1864-5 when it was built, and its fine brickwork and interior roof beams, although it has unfortunately lost its former entrance building. The German Gymnasium has hosted varied events over the years, from the first London Olympics in 1866 to more recent fetish events, but it is simply as the Gymnasium that it makes a fine venue for Brian Griffins latest show, Teamphoto, on a somewhat temporary looking first floor in this large hall.

Brian Griffin in an interesting jacket at the opening

Griffin was commissioned to produce a series of pictures to mark the building (at last) of a high speed rail line to link the Channel Tunnel with London, which unfortunately for those of us in the south and west, serves a rebuilt St Pancras station, and will significantly increase my journey times to Paris. Ah progress!

Working with art director Greg Horton, he concentrated on the team of people who worked on the line, described as Britains largest construction project (the Channel tunnel to which it links, was officially described as many years of boring activity.)

One of the more interesting aspects of the evening was that many of those portrayed in the images were present in person at the special preview, and I was intrigued both to eavesdrop on their comments and in particular those of their friends as well as to compare the person with the image that Griffin had created.

Two of the workers with portraits of them by Brian Griffin

The pictures fell into three major groups workers, bosses and groups with a few others. The images of the workers were mainly powerful black and white studio portraits, heads taken against a plain background, sharp, detailed and contrasty, showing every pore and every blade of stubble with perfect clarity. They reminded me strongly of Helmar Lerskis portraits of industrial workers and others published in his Kopfe des Alltags (1930), glorifying the everyday faces in strong close-up, and of the images of workers as heroes in Soviet Socialist Realism, mythic stakhanovites.

If Griffins workers are heroes, the bosses and managers often seem lost, dejected, ill at ease or just downright shifty. The colour images often look like the odd random scenes from old films you might come across flipping through the channels on a hotel TV and quickly move on in hope usually forlorn – of something better. I overheard one man ask a colleague if he had seen his portrait yet, and he continued that they had thought of sticking up a post-it on the frame with the caption Someones stolen my fxxking car!

I found many of these fascinating studies, generally more so than the black and white workers, powerful though some of these are. There were a few that were clearly following a storyboard (the post woman delivers a copy of the 1996 Act of Parliament for the line to a man in a suburban yard in America), others where I could identify a clear reference (one of my favourite images in the show is a Hopperesque tableau set in a hotel lobby, the subject at the counter, a head just visible on the other side and a third man in the open lift, all captured in a light that somehow curiously drains away much of the colour of the scene) but others that just left me guessing. Odd corners of sites, car parks, rather anonymous spaces that were perhaps convenient to where the person was working.

The groups are Frans Hals oils , perhaps the Cluveniers and I think a style that has often been used in advertising. Griffins examples are lively but to me have less interest than the other work in the show. Some of the images that dont fit into the main three categories also intrigued me; a straight forward image of a driver and another man on a construction train, and my other favourite image in the show, a black and white of a man in an office viewed through a venetian blind, which reminded me of the best of Griffins portraiture for Management Today that established his reputation.

Of course, openings are only partly about the pictures, and it was good to meet the photographers and others present, including in particular Paul Trevor, back from Spain on a visit connected with his forthcoming London Photo Month show, here talking to BJP editor Simon Bainbridge.

Teamphoto continues at the Gymnasium, St Pancras, NW1 until Nov 19, 2007.

Brian Griffin’s web site

Bad Press?

Yesterday I was out covering protests against the arms fair taking place in East London as a freelance photographer. I wasn’t commissioned but I hope to sell some of the pictures through the libraries I place work with as well as possibly direct from my own ‘My London Diary’ web site where they will be posted shortly. I’ve also already contributed a couple of short reports to ‘Indymedia‘ on both the march by the ‘Campaign Against the Arms Trade‘, here passing down the Barking Road,

CAAT March on Barking Road

and the Space Hijackers, who hired a tank (or at least some similar military vehicle) to take

CAAT March on Barking Road
themselves to the event after the police had stopped their own real tank. In the picture it has just arrived and stopped outside the main vehicle gate of the arms fair.

Like most news photographers, I have a press card. On the back of mine it says “The Association of Chief Police Officers of England, Wales and Northern Ireland and the Association of Chief Police Officers in Scotland recognise the holder of this card as a bona-fide newsgatherer.”

A few months ago a joint working party of police and journalists came to an agreement over guidelines for relations between the press and police, recognising the need to allow proper access to events and cooperation between police and those carrying the card.

Unfortunately although the Chief Police Officers may recognise the card – and have read the guidelines, too many officers lower down haven’t. Yesterday, when asked at one point to show my card, I was even told it wasn’t a real press card and the officer concerned wouldn’t recognise that I was press. Last year I took a picture of a fellow photographer and union member having a similar confrontation:

In his case, the police held him inside a cordon for 20 minutes although several colleagues showed their own cards to make it clear his was genuine. I was lucky in that I was just threatened with arrest if I didn’t stop arguing and get back on the other side of a police line. So I did as I was told despite being rather worked up. Unfortunately although I told him I was taking his number I was so agitated that I forgot it before I could write it down, so I can’t make a formal complaint. I thought I had it on a picture, but it isn’t visible.

I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve been threatened with arrest for just trying to do my job. I don’t think I’m getting any special treatment, and other photographers who photograph similar events suffer in the same way. Mostly I get on well with police, and they are sometimes very helpful, and of course I recognise that they often have a difficult job.

In handling demonstrations such as this by the Space Hijackers, they do seem to me to make the job more difficult for themselves by deliberately provoking the demonstrators, often moving them – as they did me – for no good reason and imposing arbitrary restrictions. The continued and over-aggressive photographing of people also raises the temperature and can be of little real use – they must by now have several thousand images of me on record.

Police photograph partying demonstrators
Demonstrator and police photographer

I go to events aiming to record what happens, to tell the story – as I see it – using my camera. I like to think of my camera (and flash) spreading a little light on what is happening, and making it known to a wider audience.

Some police – not all, but too many – seem to want to keep things private. They would prefer the press didn’t come along to demonstrations, or at least stayed in a nice neat area somewhere under police control. They think of those of us who cover such events and interact with the protesters as ‘bad’ press.

More pictures from both events on ‘My London Diary’ shortly.

Peter Marshall

My Peckham

Peckham had a mythical quality for me as a young child, the distant place not at the end of the rainbow, but of the No 37 bus route. When I finally was taken there it lived up to its promise, the gloomily industrial end of the Surrey canal at Canal Head, bustling crowds in its cosmopolitan high street, and at the large green expanse of Peckham Rye. Although I never heard a bus conductor shouting “Garden of Eden!” as the bus reached what was then a common rendezvous for courting couples and would have been too young to have understood his meaning.

Over twenty years later, returning in the 1980s, both Peckham and I had changed a little. There was no water in the canal for a start, and although the high street was still cosmopolitan, the cosmos had shifted slilghtly. Peckham had also started to gain a reputation for something different, particularly in parts of the area, such as the 1965 North Peckham Estate. And I was a photographer.

Mostly what interested me at the time were the older buildings, the remains of a prosperous early and mid-Victorian suburb (many of the meaner houses had by then been replaced by even meaner council estates,) which I photographed in black and white, but the colour pictures were more concerned with Peckham and how we lived in the 1980s. These are scans from the en-prints made at the time, so are slightly and rather randomly cropped. The originals show a little of that special shift to brown of ageing Kodak prints, still visible in the scans despite my corrections.

Canal Head with settee, 1989 (C) Peter Marshall

Choumert Road, 1989 (C) Peter Marshall

Rye Lane 1990 (C) Peter Marshall

Since then I’ve been back to Peckham occasionally. Earlier in 2007 I accompanied the Human Rights Jukebox in June, and returned for the end of its showing and the ‘I Love Peckham‘ festival h in August. For that there were sofas on the street in Canal Head once again.

I Love Peckham

The last (I think) event of ‘I Love Peckham‘ was a show, ‘Peckham Rising’ at the Sassoon Gallery which I have written about in another piece on this blog.

Peter Marshall

Peckham Rising

The Sassoon Gallery is a nicely converted space in a railway arch under Peckham Rye station (train or bus is much the best way to travel there), in an enclosed yard which is reached by walking through a bar, Bar Story, in Blenheim Grove.

Peckham Rising is only on show until 9 Sept, so get there fast (open noon-6pm.) It is a show curated by Paul Goodwin, a research fellow at the Centre for Urban and Community Research at Goldsmiths in nearby New Cross, as a part of his ‘Re-visioning Black Urbanism’ project. It includes work by three artists, photographs by Thabo Jaiyesimi and Daniele Tamagni and a sound piece by Janine Lai.

Installaion - Thabo Jaiyesimi
Thabo Jaiyesimi’s work on the gallery wall

Thabo’s series of eight images taken on the streets explore some of the issues and cultural richness of the area, often using vivid and emotional colour. A sign for housing in front of a locally notorious block of flats, shop fronts making the link to Nigeria, and another image with a black woman making a phone call tell of the distant roots of many in the area. A crowd bustles in front of the bus from central London, a black woman in a white coat pulls her shopping trolley in from of a bright orange wall and a telephone carrying a advert for the 2005 film ‘Get Rich or Die Tryin’, a partly autobiographical movie in which Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson as ‘Marcus’ plays a drug dealer who aspires to be a professional rapper.

Image courtesy of Thabo Jaiesimi

For me the most interesting image was one taken on the recent protest against gun crime in Peckham. Thabo’s flash lights up a pink glove pointing at the poster on a man’s chest reading “MURDER £20,000 reward”. The black girl’s finger points as she reads the smaller print, but reads like a gun. You can see more of his work on his web site.

Installation - Daniele Tamagni
Daniele Tamagni’s work on the wall

I talked to Italian photographer Daniele Tamagni about his work in Peckham, and he showed me a newspaper feature on his previous show of pictures taken in black churches in Peckham. The large image from this project on show at the Sassoon was an extremely striking picture, a sea of white-robed figues with a woman in the foreground coming towards the photographer cradling a baby. The only white face in the image, carefully framed between the figures, is a statue of Jesus, arms outstretched on the wall at the front of the church behind the people.

Although there were a number of interesting images in his work, overall I found the selection too disparate, and at the same time too small to represent the multiplicity of Peckham. I would much rather have seen a more focussed display of his work – such as that on the churches or another project Tamagni has done on hairdressers in the area.

Listening to Janine Lai’s sound piece

The voices recorded by Janine Lai, who works at Peckham Library presented an interesting kaleidescope of views from Peckham residents, although I found the presentation difficult to follow, trying to listen to two people at a time. It will also doubtless work rather better during the rest of the show than at the opening, with only three sets of headphones available. Perhaps for the opening it could have been put through a loudspeaker?

Perhaps the hardest part of the show for me were the texts by the curator, Paul Goodwin. In so far as I could understand the rather obscure language that is apparently a prerequisite for academic credibility, I think that he seemed to be promoting a rather uni-dimensional view of Peckham that is as limiting in its different way as the media stereotypes which he seeks to confront.

But Goodwin’s intention is, at least in part, to promote dialogue, and both the show and the lively ‘Peckham Regeneration debate‘ that took place during the opening showed a more cosmopolitan Peckham than emerges from the apparently simplistic viewpoint of black urbanism. It is an interesting show, although I’m not quite sure why, according to ‘Myspace‘ it is Female and 47 years old!

The Debate
The Peckham Regeneration debate – a contribution from the floor

You can see more of my pictures from the opening, (shot with a Leica M8 and a 35mm f1.4 lens that can almost see in the dark) on ‘My London Diary‘ shortly. They include images of the speakers at the debate, more of the installation and some pictures of the photographers I met at the show.

Footnote
The Sassoon name is one with an interesting Peckham connection. The Sassoon family were Sephardic Jews, descendants of King David, and were some of the first Jewish settlers in Bagdhad, where they became courtiers and wealthy businessmen. But it was only in the nineteenth century that David Sassoon established a great empire trading with India and the Far East, and sent one of his son’s to open a small outpost in London in 1858. After his death, the family, sometimes referred to as the Rothschilds of the East, largely moved to England.

In 1932-3, the incredibly wealthy widow of Meyer Elias Sassoon, Mozelle Sassoon, engaged architect Maxwell Fry to build Sassoon House, his first modernist work, a still striking block of working class flats in St Marys Road, Peckham, as a gift to the Pioneer Housing Trust in memory of her son, R E Sassoon.

Mozelle was the great aunt of Siegfried Sassoon, although he first met her in 1914 when he was in his late 20s. His artistic talent probably came mainly from his mother’s side, where hordes of the Thornycroft family – including many talented women, were well-known as sculptors and painters in the 19th century – as you go over Westminster Bridge you pass Thomas Thornycroft’s ‘Boadicea and Her Daughters.’ But probably the best-known Sassoon now is hairdresser Vidal, who, so far as I know, is without links to Peckham (although his Greek-born father’s family had its origins in Iraq) and was born in poverty in Whitechapel.

Peter Marshall