Yes, it’s how I saw it

Here is the text of an e-mail I received today, which I will quote anonymously – but otherwise in full:

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Hi in regard to you site as above, did you realise the pciture of the source of the river has a man who looks like he is relieving himself!! There is an issue of something wet and his arms are held in front, was this deliberate or have you not noticed?! OR is it yourself??

I’m not sure it is appropriate if on purpose, and if not the picture should have been checked!!

Would have been nice if the rubbish was cleared before taking the photograph too!

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The site in question was named in the subject line. Its full title looks like something like this:

The Lea Valley

London’s Second River – The River Lea (or Lee)

from source to mouth – including the London 2012 Olympic site – photographed by Peter Marshall

and the second picture on the page is:

33d56: The source of the River Lea, Leagrave, near Luton, Bedfordshire.
December 1982.TL 061 248

and is captioned as shown.

What kind of a world does my correspondent live in if he is in any doubt about what this picture shows, or somehow thinks that I might have not noticed what this guy, a few feet from me and the central point of the picture, is doing?

Had Bernard, shown here, informed me of his intentions in advance I might have got the exposure a little better, as the picture is a pig to print, and, before the advent of Photoshop, did need a little ferri to bring out its finer points.

Given the way the stream emerges – or at least did in 1982 – through a grille at the bottom of this concrete block looking far more like a sewage outfall than a sparkling rivulet, his gesture seemed appropriate. As too did the rubbish, which as a matter of good documentary ethics I would not have dreamed of touching,

I don’t often use potassium ferricyanide on prints, but applied on the tip of a fine sable brush here it made the smaller of the two streams stand out more clearly and impressively, leaving I thought no doubt as to what is was. Sometimes our work needs a little help in small ways like this, and so long as what we do is entirely in keeping with the spirit of the event I don’t think it matters.

More often I retouched prints to hide the accidents of photography – dust and scratches, but also occasionally to remove white spots that were actually present in the image. Unless I’m doing a feature on pigeons, then I have no qualms about removing or dulling down the evidence of their existence where it interfered with the reading of the image.

Entirely by fortunate coincidence, it was also pissing down when I started from the Thames at the other end of my journey along the Lea, though this time it was the heavens that had opened rather than Bernard’s fly:

Limehouse
33f33: Regents Canal Dock entrance to River Thames during torrential rain,
October 1982. TQ 363 808

I haven’t finished my Lea Valley web site, although there are a large number of my images on it already, starting from around 1981, and including much of my recent work, but with at the moment around a ten year gap in the middle. At the moment a significant part of the area is about to be radically changed into a giant building site, the location of the London 2012 Olympics, with the loss of significant wildlife habitats (and ironically, sporting facilities including one of London’s largest cycling centres, miles of angling along river and canal and various football and other sports pitches) along with the allotments mentioned here previously.

My pictures do give a good idea of what the area is like and things – both good and bad – that will be lost. I hope to continue photographing the Lea Valley – and my web site – to give an idea of how things have changed in the legacy of the games long after they finish.

Peter Marshall

Banish those M8 Blues

Or rather more accurately, cyans.

At last, a simple method for removing the cyan corners that you get by using a UV cut filter on a non-Leica coded wideangle. I’ve so far tested it on an older 21mm Voigtlander f4. The other lens I’m currently using with a UV cut filter is an old Summicron 50mm, which gives little or no cyan effect because of its narrower field of view.

I’ve tested it only on Windows XP. However Panotools (Panorama Tools, the free programs and libraries originally written by German professor Helmut Dersch, which form the basis of some of the finest software for working with panoramas) is available for other platforms. Mac users might want to look at Kekus Lensfix CI – you can download a free trial version, and registration is $25.

For Windows you can download a free package with a convenient installer. Your first step, unless you already have PanoTools installed on your copy of Photoshop (Look under Filter menu for Panorama Tools if you are not sure) is to install it (if you have it already, start at point 3 below):

1. Go to Jim Watter’s PanoTools page, and d/l the PanoTools distribution, currently PanoTools12_2007Apr25.zip [Version: MinGW 2.8.6 Size: 894KB]
2. Extract the files to any folder, double-click on Setup.exe, then follow the prompts.
3. After installation is complete, start Photoshop, load one of your files with those nasty cyan corners.
3. Select Filter, Panorama Tools and chose PTCorrect
4. Check the Radial Luminance box, make usre all others are unchecked.
5. Click on options for Radial Luminance, enter 9 for red, click OK
6. Click OK to run the filter on the current file.
7. Check the cyan cast is gone and there is no red cast.
8. Smile and save your corrected file.

Before:
Before

After
After

Magic! And even just about visible on these small moderate quality jpegs, though the difference is much more impressive on the originals. One small warning. Leica users tend not to crop images (though even HC-B did on at least a couple of occasions.) But if you do, don’t crop until after you have removed the cyan cast!

Values of between 6 and 9 seems around correct for most images from my 21mm f4 Voigtlander. Wider lenses should need higher values, and longer lenses lower values. If you find the result now has a red cast in the corners, simply undo the filter and try again with a lower value. The cyan cast may depend on the aperture used, but unless you’ve gone back to using a paper notebook you probably won’t know that. However it does make the 21mm Voigtlander a very usable lens for colour images with the M8.

The next job is to record a suitable actions in Photoshop to run PTCorrect and assign it to a function key combo. I chose Ctrl+Shift F8. You need to ensure that the appropriate value is set for radial luminance and no other boxes are checked before you use the short cut, but it retains values until you alter them.

Then, from Lightroom (of course you can use any other raw converter – or even, if misguided enough, shoot in jpeg mode) after you have set the necessary development parameters (remember to judge colour on the centre of the image), you can define an export pre-set that both saves your file in its final destination and opens it in Photoshop.

Having used this for the first image in a set to be processed, Ctrl+Rt-Arrow takes you to the next image, Ctrl+Shift+Alt+E exports the file in the same way as the previous file, thus opening it in Photoshop, where your chosen function key combo does the business.

At this stage I do any other Photoshop work the image requires – if any, then simply close it, agreeing that I want to save it. It would almost certainly be possible to further automate this sequence, especially if you have later versions of Photoshop than me by putting a suitable droplet into Lightroom’s export actions, but I leave this as your homework exercise!

I don’t think it likely that Leica will ever make it easy for photographers to use non-Leica lenses, and although some people have managed to fool the M8 by painting dots on lenses, this is rather tricky. Unless the lens also selects the expected viewfinder frame it doesn’t seem to work either, and none of my non-Leica lenses seems to.

Mysteriously, the only lens I own that correctly records focal length in the M8 file EXIF data is an old 90mm, completely dot-free. There must be a reason for this, but I’m not that bothered. I can tell which lens I used even if the camera can’t.

For me, the M8 – like the other Leica M fit bodies I own (M2, Hexar and Minolta CLE) is a tool for taking pictures. I want to be able to fit a lens and take pictures. Any lens with the right mount. I use it because it is a beautifully simple and direct tool, that enables me to work in a very intuitive manner, and delivers great results. Or at least did on film. Getting the M8 to do what I want is proving harder, but PTCorrect is another considerable step in the right direction.

Human Rights & Art

It was in the 1960s that I joined the National Council for Civil Liberties – now known simply as ‘Liberty‘, after seeing the way that travellers were being hounded by the police, giving up time to help prevent their eviction from otherwise unused derelict sites that had been flattened in the massive redevelopments then taking place in Manchester’s inner suburbs.

Over recent years I’ve photographed many events related to civil rights and human rights abuse in this country, as well as continuing to support ‘Liberty’ and also friends who have taken practical action to support people who our government have been denied both any benefits from the state and the right to work, leaving them destitute.

Saturday I’d hoped to see a performance by Mark McGowan, burning an effigy of Margaret Hodge as a protest against her statement that established British residents should be given precedence over economic migrants for council housing. But there were no traces of a fire on Camberwell Green at noon. Perhaps, as in Birmingham earlier this year, it had been prevented on health & safety grounds. I only hope the guys will be out stopping such things happening on November 5!

Instead I joined the ‘Human Rights Jukebox‘ in its progress from the Camberwell Magistrates Court to Peckham, another event in the Camberwell Arts Week. The ‘March of the Human Rights Jukebox’ was organised by Isa Suarez, who had a one-year artists residency in Southwark in 2006. The juke box included thoughts on people’s rights from many residents and diverse groups in Southwark, some of whom marched with banners along with it.

At the start of the event, the Dulwich Choral Society performed a specially composed piece by Suarez, including words from the ‘Jukebox’. On Clerkenwell Green we stopped for a impassioned recital (in French) by a black African poet, and in front of the old baths in Artichoke Place (now the Leisure Centre) there was a long performance by the band Deadbeat International as well as a short song by three musicians that left us wanting more. Deadbeat International also performed at various other points on route, including another energetic set at Peckham library. The march was led into peckham by a rapper, with some forthright views on human rights.

Accompanying the jukebox were the live art group ‘mmmmmm‘, Adrian Fisher & Luna Montengro, covered from head to foot in sheets of paper containing the complete text of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, in both English and Spanish as well as the pages of a world atlas.

Article 11 of the UN Human Rights Declaration hits the shredder.

In front of the library at Peckham, mmmmm completed the event by unpinning the sheets from each other one by one, reading the clauses and feeding the sheets into a shredder (and when this gave up, tearing them up.) Each then poured cold water over the other and threw the shredded papers, so that they stuck to the wet clothes and skin. Finally we were all invited (in what we were informed was an Argentine custom) to jump once into the air for each of the 30 clauses of the Declaration.

On the way to the event, I’d jumped off the bus at the Oval, where ‘Stop the War’ and other demonstrators were protesting. Gordon Brown was apparently expected to arrive at 12.00 to watch some kind of game there. It was a very different kind of action to the ‘jukebox’ though both were political and art in their different ways, although only one gets arts council funding.

The Human Rights Jukebox was more cultural than political, involving the participation of various marginalised groups, including migrants and those who have suffered from mental illness (and artists who are too in some ways marginalised.) Of course the cultural is political as I’ve long argued, and, for example, we need a huge cultural shift to make any effective action on climate change possible. The imagery of the ‘Stop the War’ demo is stereotyped and so familiar that it is perhaps hard to see it changing any minds, and a more creative approach might be more effective.

I’m a supporter of ‘Stop the War’ and have been on many demonstrations. It’s hard to stomach that we had the overwhelming majority of the British people behind us, organised the largest demonstration the country has ever seen but failed to influence events. Perhaps the underlying reason was that the leadership failed to think creatively and call for decisive action when it was needed.

Peckham has a bad reputation, and at times deserves it, but in many ways it is a vibrant place and interesting things happen there and just along the road in Camberwell. You can see more pictures of the March of the Human Rights Jukebox, as well as a few of the Oval demo, and some great kids on their bikes from track in Burgess Park who called in at Peckham Library while I was there on My London Diary.

Naked Bike Ride – Problems

I have a few problems with the WNBR. No objection to nudity, certainly no objection to environmental protest – I’ve participated in many, though keeping largely clothed.

First, I think the ride is lousy at getting it’s message across. Far too few of the riders or their bikes even carry slogans. Almost zero leafleting as the ride goes through some of the most crowded streets of the capital. People do look, but they wonder what its all about and nobody tells them. And if there was a press officer around at the start they were in hiding.

This year too, the ride seemed much faster. Last year I ran a kilometre of the route with it, going considerably faster than the riders even though stopping occasionally to photograph them. This year, though I’m fitter, I struggled to keep up for a few hundred metres. Speed makes it even harder to read the text on those bodies that do carry it.

Perhaps one answer would be to try to recruit leafleteers from those who sympathise with the aims of the ride but don’t want to strip off, and get them leafleting in key areas such as Piccadilly Circus, Covent Garden, Oxford St etc.

Secondly, the London ride has what it calls a ‘photography policy‘, but might better be called a ‘no-photography policy’. It’s main effect is to make the organisers look silly, as although it has caused a considerable controversy, it seems to have little or no effect in practice.

New this year (or so I understand) were the “photo policy enforcement boards” which riders were encouraged to print and carry, bearing the message “this photo was taken without permission“, to be held as protection against intrusive photographers. I searched long and hard, but to my disappointment failed to spot a single one.

Last year I hadn’t read the photo policy, so it didn’t inhibit my work at all. Photography for me is in any case almost always a two-way affair, involving some kind of relationship between me and my subject. Unlike the proposers of photo policies, I think photographing from my typical working distance of around 1 – 2 metres with a wide-angle is usually less intrusive than standing back and using a long lens.

Last year I photographed many of the individuals on the ride (including some I knew from other, clothed, events), and only one person declined to have a picture taken (perhaps because she had just been photographed by another photographer.) With one group I came to an interesting arrangement (I’ll leave you to speculate, but it was a very warm day and I was hot and happy to oblige) before they too were happy for me to photograph as I liked.

WNBR

If people take their kit off in public places – where they have no reasonable expectation of privacy – they also can have no reasonable objection to being photographed. No permission is required, and the policy and those boards are a nonsense.

However, unreasonable behaviour is still unreasonable, whether or not some or all of those concerned are wearing clothes. We generally deal with it by making our complaint clear rather than claiming some right we don’t legally have. There are actually laws which can be invoked to prevent nuisance, but would not apply to photographers who behave reasonably.

If the organisers of events such as this feel there is a problem, then they could make arrangements in order to prevent it happening. There are actually some suggestions as to how this could be done on the ride wiki pages. Of course riders who for some reason want to hide their identity can do so by wearing masks.

As always when photographing, if asked I gave people in my pictures my web address. After I posted some of the images, quite a few e-mailed asking for more pictures or larger files of their own image to print, and of course I sent them. The ride was a significant event for them and they welcome a good photographic record.

One of the very noticeable things in the event is the number of those taking part who are wearing little but a camera, including some very professional looking DSLRs and also video cameras. They too see it as something they want to photograph.

Actually I would have nothing against a reasonable photo policy. It might say something like “Photographers are requested not to pester any individuals who make it clear they do not wish to be photographed.”

The third problem I have is usage. What do I do with the pictures after I’ve taken them? What I certainly don’t want to do is to set up My London Diary as some kind of soft-porn site, so I’m very careful about what I post there. Again, given that the images are not model-released, I think even editorial use needs to be considered very carefully.

We also live in odd times so far as nudity is concerned, and there have been many who have suffered for taking images that most of us would feel unproblematic. Even owning widely respected photographic books has at times resulted in police warnings and prosecution. Most agreements with web hosting companies have very restrictive clauses on what may be posted, and in case of complaints I’m told some find it simpler just to close accounts rather than decide if the complaint is justified. As someone who runs web sites for several other organisations, posting doubtful material is a risk I don’t wish to take.

Much of my photography is made with an eye on history. Not generally recording major events, but the kind of minor happenings that contribute to understanding how we live. Quite a few of my pictures have already appeared in books about our current era, as well in various museum shows. In a few years time more of my WNBR pictures may come out too.

Some carefully selected images from the London 2007 World Naked Bike Ride appear in My London Diary.

If you took part in the race, think I may have photographed you and would like a copy of the picture but can’t find it there, you can email me to ask.
Peter Marshall

World Naked Bike Ride – News Values

If we are honest, after reading this heading, probably half of us are at this point hoping for titillation. Or I could shorten that last word considerably. Put crudely, ‘News Values’ demand tits.

10,000 marching for Palestine. Perhaps 3,000 Orangemen and women. A thousand or so naked or near naked cyclists. No contest, not even for the BBC. When I switched on Radio 4 for the 10 o’clock news there was only one London event. And there was no one there wearing a burkha.

Naked Bike Ride
We are a culture with a problem. A fixation on TV and in at least the red-top press with sleaze and sexiness. Not of course anything too explicit. I picked up a so-called newspaper on the train on my way home from photographing. Page after page of gossipy snippets about celebrities and their trivial behaviours, the ‘sexy’ dresses they wore or fell out of, their affairs. Not only claiming to be about actual people, although few of them have much relation to their media images, but even about the characters some play in TV shows. It all made such dreary reading.

After that came pages of adverts for so-called adult services, none of which I’ve ever dreamed of paying for, despite being considerably over 21. It was almost a relief to come to the sports pages, where massage probably did mean massage.

Somewhere hidden away in the corner of a page I did find some more real news. Around 50 words on the latest from Iraq. Ditto Iran. Drugs. A judge accused as a flasher.

Papers like that employ journalists to write the crap. Pay photographers to photograph it. Nobody needs to go there, its surely not that hard to earn an honest crust?

One organization working for proper news values is Media Workers Against the War, set up at the time of the first Gulf War, but now covering wider issues, though of course with a special interest in Iraq. It’s a site worth keeping an eye on, and supporting.

More about the Naked Bike Ride, and some of the problems I have with it in a later note.

London, Ireland – 200 Years of Marching

Unless you belong to one of the many Loyal Orange Lodges, last Saturday’s celebration of 200 years of marches by Irish protestants will probably have passed unnoticed, unless it literally passed you by (that literally really means literally, rather than its now more standard usage to mean metaphorically!) If you weren’t on the right street at the right time it will metaphorically have passed you by as it literally didn’t!

Orange March 1

So what are such marches about? Obviously about proclaiming identity. About celebrating protestant ascendancy. Community solidarity. Marking out your territory. And if it intimidates some of the Papes, that’s certainly no bad thing. Why else drumming as a martial art and all those piercing flutes?

Actually, I’m a Prod too. If extremely lapsed*. The thunderings of Paisley resonated (even on occasion literally) in the local chapel where most of my wider family worshipped if my immediate branch favoured the more intellectual Congregationalists. More middle-class, they had a better quality of church teas too.

Twenty five years ago I went to visit one of my aging aunts, then in sheltered accommodation. My eye fell on a headline on a newsletter on the sideboard, ‘Mixed Marriages’. It wasn’t as I first thought, some racist literature that had been pushed through her letterbox by the National Front, but from a supposedly Bible-based organization defending the Protestant faithful against the devious wiles of the Catholic opposite sex and their sin-dripping priests.

Even King James never authorized that, such religious venom isn’t in any bible I know. The snake in Genesis didn’t even bite, and the apple into which Eve sank her teeth and persuaded Adam to follow suit is notoriously indiscriminatory (or there would be little provocation for the article.)

Maybe now the Orange Lodge is just a social club bringing together like-minded men (and women in the women’s lodges) of the true protestant faith. Perhaps, given the Thatcher-accelerated end of manufacture there aren’t now the jobs for which membership used to be a sine qua non.

Park Lane in London is a long way from Portadown in 1807, where members of Loyal Orange Lodge No.1 took to the streets on 1 March that year. For anyone who either isn’t English or studied history after the Tories brought in the National Curriculum, King William III, then just Prince of Orange to us, successfully invaded england in 1688, and the first Orange association was formed a few days after he landed when he reached Exeter. As to exactly what our ‘Glorious Revolution’ acheived, and in particular the ‘Bill of Rights’ which followed, it’s still a matter of discussion. (10 marks) (Ans: Stuffing the Catholics (5 marks), Limited toleration of non-conformists (2 marks), Ridiculous Authority for Church of England (3 marks.))

Everyone I saw seemed to be having a good time, and although many of the tourists who stood to watch were likely to have been Catholics I can’t say any looked upset. And even if the drums might have beat louder as the passed Westminster Cathedral, I suspect Cardinal Cormac Murphy O’Connor would have smiled his little apologetic smile at this demonstration of Christian witness.

More pictures from the Orange March on My London Diary

Peter Marshall

*Jesus I can believe, but not the Church.

London Olympics – Green Disaster

Now it is official. The 2012 London Olympics will NOT be green. Just the same old corporate brownfield concrete Olympics as before.

London 2012 was offered a chance by the Manor Gardens Allotments and it has now finally turned it down. A chance to do something fresh and exciting, to incorporate a green centre into the Olympic site. But from the beginning it was obviously a long shot, something that the kind of large scale business-led planning couldn’t begin to appreciate.

The notice on the Life Island web site is short. “Following the granting of planning permission for the Marsh Lane replacement site on Tuesday evening, and negotiations with the LDA today, it was decided that the Judicial Review would be cancelled. It was to have commenced tomorrow the 14th June.”

I don’t attach any blame to Manor Gardens. They’ve put up a great fight, but with the provision of the Marsh Lane site they’ve obviously lost their major battle. The revised proposals for the site, including the removal and replacement of 880mm (almost 3 feet) of topsoil and the provision of 64 plots, each with its own shed, as well as a communal hut, should mean that allotment holders are back in business later this year, and the impact on the Marsh Lane site has also been slightly lessened. They are also to be allowed limited access to their existing plots to harvest their crops until September, and cash compensation, apparently of £850 each, for the disturbance as well as help with the removal. So there have been some fairly important gains from the plot-holders point of view. There is also a promise to relocate the plots back onto a new site within the Olympic area in 2014, although not on their current site, which I think is more likely to become a prestige housing development.

What we all have lost is an exciting Green vision of garden plots at the centre of the Olympic site. It will now just be the usual boring concrete acres with probably a giant corporate sponsored scoreboard where the allotments were. A desert with no real food – just fast junk from corporate sponsors, and you will be searched as you enter to make sure you bring nothing with you that doesn’t bear the correct sponsor’s logo.

This is Marsh Lane, where the allotments will be relocated:

taken in 2005. It isn’t an idyllic rural scene, but is an important area of open space, and one that has been vested in the people in perpetuity.
The allotments are just around the corner, where I photographed the ‘New Lammas Lands Defence Committee’ demonstrating against their loss last December:
Allotment relocation site
You can see more pictures from this event at:
http://www.mylondondiary.co.uk/2006/12/dec17-01.htm

I’ve made several visits to Manor Gardens Allotments. I was at the ‘New Year Feast’ which included the Hackney Wick Olympic Flame, and in March I went for a meeting with the Olympics Delivery Authority, who pulled out at the last minute, and went on to visit the allotments again, and in April I was there for the Spring Party.

Its not really a place that can be summed up in a single picture:
Manor Gardens
and visually it is very rich. No two sheds are the same, each carrying the traces of present and past owners. No two plots are the same.

You can’t really manage history, or at least not in the way that we try to do at the moment – and there is plenty of this attempted in the planning submission. In a way its like gardening. All you can do is plant things and give them the right conditions in which to grow. It isn’t matter of ticking boxes, meeting this and that requirement, detailed plans etc. Those give you something sanitised and lacking in interest.

I’m sad. Sad that as a nation we’ve lost vision, lost flair. Gained regulation, uniformity. No room for people like Major Villiers who endowed the Manor Gardens plots.

At the bottom of the lack of vision in Olympic planning is fear. Or, as they might call it, security. From July 2 the Olympic site will be a total no-go area, with all roads and footpaths closed. The allotments couldn’t stay because they are scared that gardeners will bring in bombs with their gardening tools!

Eastway and Ruckholt Road will continue to go through the site, possibly too the Greenway and Lea Navigation towpath, though these are subject to closures on the developers whim. If you want to see the Lower Lea before its destruction (aka regeneration) you only have a few days left before the lock-down.

You can see quite a few images from around 1980 to the present on my unfinished River Lea site and also, particularly more recent work on My London Diary; most of my visits to the Olympic site are listed under Newham, although some parts are in Hackney, and small areas in Tower Hamlets and Waltham Forest.
Peter Marshall

Cry for Palestine

Last Saturday I photographed the start of the march from Lincoln’s Inn Fields to the rally in Trafalgar Square, part of the international day of action to mark the 40th anniversary of the Middle East War (aka 6 Day War) under the slogan: “The World Says No to Israeli Occupation“.

Palestine demo The unfortunate truth is that much of the world has generally failed to say no, or at best has only whispered it, while America keeps shovelling support to Israel. At the very start, during the war, it was Russia that failed the Arabs (and in particular the Palestinians), their failure to respond scuppering any effective UN action.

I’ve considerable sympathy and support for Israel, but not in this respect. As kids we thrilled to the story of David and Goliath, the small boy taking on the powerful giant with his sling and smooth stones and winning. Thousands of years later, many here welcomed the new state of Israel, and certainly we acknowledge its right to a peaceful existence. But now the bulldozers and tanks are driven by Israeli soldiers and the small Palestinian boys throw the stones with generally negligible effect.

Of course there are attacks on Israel, particularly by suicide bombers and the largely random firing of rockets. Israel publicy blames the Palestinian government while knowing that it has destroyed any ability they might have to prevent such things happening, and uses this impotent failure as an excuse for disproportionate retaliation. The current near civil war could not have happened without years of this misguided Israeli policy of undermining successive Palestinian governments in every way they can – when obviously making a peace settlement needed a strong Palestinian leadership.

Recently I’ve been reading the reports of a friend in occupied Palestine as a human rights observer. Deacon Dave is now back here and was on this march. His reports tell of the everyday and almost incessant harassment of Palestinians by the army. Dave himself was attacked, fortunately only receiving relatively minor injuries, and he ducked just in time as he saw a soldier about to open fire. Later, there were apologies from some officers, but it was very much a case of too little, too late.

As well as the army, there were also regular attacks on Palestinians and observers by settlers, but he also told of the efforts by Israeli groups such as ‘Rabbis for Human Rights’ to stop the arbitrary demolitions of houses.

Wars, though sometimes justified, seldom if ever solve problems; usually they simply prolong them. In the end there has to be the difficult process of learning to live together, peace and reconciliation, something that has been put off far too long in the Middle East, perhaps largely because it simply is something that few Americans appear to realise as a possibility let alone a necessity.

Arwa sings

Last month I heard Arwa Abu Haikal, a long unpaid government employee of the Ministry of Youth and Sports in Hebron talk movingly about life under the occupation, and in particular the problems of living near settlers, who though often settling and acting illegally are seldom bothered by the Israeli Army. The picture shows her later that day, singing a lullaby from Palestine.

I was pleased to hear that the NUJ in April had called for support for a consumer boycott of Israeli goods. It didn’t surprise me when some members suggested it called into question the impartiality of our reporting of the issues and others made allegations of anti-semitism, although I don’t beleive either comment is justified. Although it has caused considerable outcry, and there are some problems with the way the issue was handled at the ADM, I hope that it will be confirmed at next year’s meeting. The Palestinian people need and deserve our support – as too do the Israeli people, but not their current government policies. Of course the eventual settlement in the area must enable the two peoples to live together.

More of my pictures from the Palestine march at http://mylondondiary.co.uk/2007/06/jun.htm#palestine
My London Diary

Peter Marshall

June comes in late

June has finally dawned at My London Diary, with work online at http://mylondondiary.co.uk/2007/06/jun.htm.

Apologies to those people who I know were waiting to see themselves online, but its been a busy month so far, especially as I’ve had to be away for several days in Hull for family reasons. Here is a list of the main events (all in London) covered so far this month. You’ll find links to them at the top left of the main June page.

bonkersfest, camberwell
the world can’t wait (g8)
brian haw – six years of protest
sikh federation march
end occupation in palestine
200 years of orange marches
2007 world naked bike ride
stokefest, stoke newington
blockorama, dalston

Comments here welcomed.

Peter Marshall

The New Panopticon

Photosynth from Microsoft Live Labs is amazing. Currently only available as a free technology preview, it gives a glimpse into a future that could completely re-draw our map of publishing and imaging and perhaps more.

If your system is up to it (Windows XP and Vista only, a fast web connection and decent graphics card), it only takes a few minutes to download and install this 5Mb ActiveX control, and although the preview is currently limited to supplied image collections, it does give some idea of the power of this technology in connecting images into truly “breathtaking multidimensional spaces with zoom and navigation features that outstrip all expectation.”

Microsoft acquired the technology by buying the Seattle company Seadragon in February. The team have also been working with the BBC for the series ‘How We Built Britain’. You can see some of the work from this country in the Your Britain in Pictures demonstration (which will also install the Photosynth control if it is not already present.) The Trafalgar Square collection is interesting as it includes archive images from the Royal Institute of British Architects and the National Media Museum, although it is perhaps a little short of images to show the full potential of the system.

You can get a better idea of its potential by watching its ‘architect’, Blaise Aguera y Arcas, demonstrating a more advanced version at TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design), a high-level annual conference sponsored by BMW, which also makes clearer some of the issues involved as well as demonstrating the incredible power of the application.

One image set was produced by searching photo-sharing site Flickr for images of Notre Dame in Paris, aggregating this incredibly disparate set of images (many typical tourist snaps) to produce a detailed highly-zoomable 3D model of the building, which also incorporates any captioning and keywording from the originals. As Blaise remarks at one point, their use of images has severe implications about copyright. Both the small print of photo-sharing sites and also proposed legislation on ‘orphan works’ are perhaps to some extent driven by the possibilities of software such as this.

At one point, Blaise throws the whole of an issue of ‘The Guardian’ on the screen, laid out page by page, then effortlessly scrolls and zooms around it, zooming at one point down to single character level to show the high resolution the system supports. Of course it needn’t just be a picture that already can provide rather superior quality to the printed version as well as being in some respects easier to browse; it would be simple to make it searchable text and to add text hotlinks to the existing image links.

This is a part of technology that can and will change the future of publishing – and lead to the end of print except as a niche fine-art medium. I think it will also change the whole economic and social structure of the industry. Probably not for the better, and almost certainly not for the benefit of those currently working in it.

Among many print journalists there still seems to be something of a head in the sand mentality. Citizen journalism, blogs, interactive web technologies and more are not going to go away. If we don’t learn more about the future we have no chance of influencing it.

At the moment, the Internet is still largely in the ‘Black and Decker’ age, where anyone can set up a site – like this one – and get their ideas out. A click of the mouse takes you from one site to another. Developments like this make the idea of huge and largely if not entirely isolated seamless commercial content conglomerations, rather more likely as the future.

Photosynth is also a glimpse of an Orwellian nightmare, linked to our increasing coverage of security cameras. This week a judge was acquitted in an indecent exposure trial because it could neither be proved nor disproved that he was the person involved. Had the CCTV images from the train been available they could have proved his innocence (or guilt), but apparently the British Transport Police had been too busy to collect them before the storage was overwritten.

The camera on the station, in the carriage, on the platform, the underground passage way, the street corner, in the bus, the workplace entry will doubtless soon all be wifi linked to network storage. Rather than tailing suspects, computers will recognise them by clothing and facial features, pulling out a collection from the giant image base, aggregating it with information from mobile phone locations and conversations. Little need for the house arrest that has got our government into trouble with the judges.

Modern technology enables us to spread Bentham’s Panopticon, with its control over minds by both the actual surveillance of individuals and the fear of the individual that they may be watched to the whole city. Photosynth and related software for handling and processing huge collections of data isn’t just going to revolutionise how we view and use images.

Peter Marshall