Shaker Aamer, Raif Badawi & Climate Change: On Wednesday 17 June 2015 the weekly ‘Stand with Shaker’ vigil outside Parliament was visited by two of the new intake of MPs. Outside Downing Street human rights organisations took part in a national day of action calling for the release of Saudi blogger Raif Badawi. A mass lobby on climate change brought around 250 MPs out of Parliament to meet voters who were urging them to persuade our government to take a leading role in the forthcoming Paris climate talks and after the lobby there was a large rally on Millbank.
New MPs Stand with Shaker
Parliament Square
In 2015 the Free Shaker Aamer campaign was holding a lunchtime vigil on the pavement opposite Parliament every Wednesday when it was in session, calling for our government to urge the US authorities to release London resident Shaker Aamer still held in the illegal Guantanamo torture camp. Two newly elected MPs came to support the campaign.
Labour MP for Norwich South, Clive Lewis, stands with Shaker Aamer
Aamer was one of the original residents brought to the camp in 2002 after being sold to the US Army by bandits in Afghanistan where he was working for a Muslim charity,. He was first cleared for release in 2007.
Twickenham Conservative MP Tania Mathias in an orange jump suit
He remained held there years later, probably because he would be able to give evidence about his torture at Bagram and Guantanamo which would embarrass both US and UK security services. He was finally released in September 2015.
Women hold posters of Raif Badawi and his lawyer his lawyer Waleed Abulkhair, also in jail
Human rights organisations including Index on Censorship, English Pen and the Peter Tatchell Foundation held a rally and handed in a letter to PM David Cameron calling on him to urge the Saudi government to release Saudi Blogger Raif Badawi.
Badawi was arrested in 2012 and convicted for founding a liberal web site which was alleged to be insluting Islam. Hia sentence was increased in 2013 to a 1 million riyals (£175,000) fine, ten-year in prison and 1000 lashes, a punishment he was unlikely to survive.
Andy McDonald MP, Mhairi Black MP, Mark Durkan MP, Caroline Lucas MP, Jo Glanville, English PEN, Natalie McGarry MP, and Stewart McDonald MP outside Downing St with letter to David Cameron and picture of jailed blogger Raif Badawi
Badawi was flogged 50 times on 9 January 2015 and was due to be given another 50 lashes every Friday until the total was reached. But further floggings had been postponed so far as he had not recovered sufficiently.
Threats of flogging continued until at least 2016, but were delayed on health grounds sometimes only hours before they were to be carried out in what seems to have been a deliberate psychological torture. Finally he was released in 2022 but with a ban on travelling abroad until 2032. His wife and children fled the country and were granted political asylum in Canada in 2013.
Labour’s Rupa Huq, MP for Ealing Central and Acton in the centre of a large group from her constituency
Thousands came to lobby their MPs, who met constituency groups either inside the Houses of Parliament or in a series of meetings spread out in Victoria Gardens, across Lambeth Bridge and on along the Albert Embankment.
Some, like Tooting MP Sadiq Khan took advantage of the bicycle rickshaws to ferry them to the meetings
I listened in briefly to a number of these meetings as I was walking around to take pictures. Most MPs seemed aware of the need for action, but too many were making excuses for not being able to take the kind of urgent action needed, and some seemed to me to have a have a patronising attitude that would certainly have lost them my vote.
The only heated argument I saw was with Neil Coyle, MP for Bermondsey and Old Southwark. After talking with him on climate change, the conversation moved on to housing, with Coyle defending the indefensible actions of the Labour local authority in emptying out their council estates and handing them over to be developed for private sale.
The crowd stretched a long way back on Millbank and there were more in Victoria GardensNo to Austerity – Yes to a million climate jobs!’ is the message from the Trade Union Group of the Campaign against Climate Change
After the lobby, the crowds moved on to Millbank for a rally, though many who had come from more distant parts of the country had instead begun their long journeys home. As well as filling Millbank, others sat on the grass in Victoria Gardens, where they could hear the many speakers, though not see them or the giant screen on which they and some short films were shown.
Surfers Against Sewage stand with their boards
With more than a hundred organisations taking part in the lobby, there were rather too many speakers for me, along with a number of celebrities, some of whom had very little of substance to contribute.
People make hearts with their hands
But there were others certainly worth listening to – and I name some and there are some photographs on My London Diary. But for me it was only the closing speech by Asad Rehman of Friends of the Earth which made a real attempt to tackle the political issues that are central to any effective action on climate.
Diggers at Runnymede: On Saturday 16th June 2012 I cycled to Runnymede in Surrey on the south bank of the Thames, a large area of National Trust land which was possibly the site where King John met the barons and agreed to the Magna Carta in 1215. There is a large area of meadow on both sides of the current course of the River Thames and the actual site of the meeting within this remains uncertain.
I stepped back a couple of paces from the circle to take this picture
The meeting that I attended was close to the American Bar Association Magna Carta Memorial, unveiled here in 1957 – and almost certainly not where the 1215 meeting took place, but a short distance above the meadows on the slope of Coopers Hill.
There I met a group of ‘Diggers’ who were camping further up the hill, ecologists whose ideas mirror those of the original Diggers or ‘True Levellers’ founded by Gerard Winstanley in 1649 after the first English Civil War. He stated that “true freedom lies where a man receives his nourishment and preservation, and that is in the use of the earth” and that “England is not a free people, till the poor that have no land have a free allowance to dig and labour the commons.”
When food became horrendously expensive in 1649 the Diggers set up a camp on common land at St George’s Hill in Weybridge and began to grow vegetables there. The local landowners called in the army, who came and decided the Diggers were not harming anyone and told the landowners to take their case to court.
Instead the landowners paid a gang of ruffians to attack the Diggers, beating them up and burning down a house. Three years after the 2012 meeting, history repeated itself during the Magna Carta 800th anniversary celebrations, when police illegally invaded the Runnymede Eco-Village community set up by the new Diggers to stop their peoples’ celebration. The site is now occupied by luxury housing.
The original Diggers based their ideas of sharing of property from the New Testament and early Christianity and also looked back to England before the Norman Conquest. After 1066 the Norman Conquerors took hold of the land and divided it between themselves and there has been remarkably little change in land ownership over the almost 950 years since then, with the same families still owning the great majority of English land; 0.65% of the UK population currently own more than two thirds of the UK land area.
It was an interesting discussion with some very historically informed contributions about Magna Carta and the lesser-known but more relevant to the common man ‘Charter of the Forest‘ which was issued shortly afterwards as well as a discussion of current issues and some interesting proposals for the future. As well as hoping to use the Eco-village as a practical example of their philosophy they also decided to hold a people’s celebration of the 800th anniversary in 2015 to take place as well as the official events.
At the end of the meeting people get up to go to the Diggers campsite
After a long meeting we walked up the hill to the Diggers camp close to the long disused Runnymede campus of Brunel University and I made a few pictures. The Eco-village was finally set up a few yards further down the slope.
More From Brockley: Pictures from my walk on 18th March 1990 in Brockley. The previous post on this walk was Nunhead and Brockley. The pictures in this post are all from a small area of Brockley.
Mantle Rd, Brockley, Lewisham, 1990, 90-3f-31
Two men walk around a street corner into the sun, their shadows clean on the pavement behind them. Like many who lived# in the area the two men are black.
This Brockley Cross at the north end of Mantle Road and it slopes down under a railway bridge to Brockley Station. Two railway lines cross here and I think the 4 aspect signal was on the line from London Bridge to Brockley. The other line, according to Edith’s Streets, was a goods line and the area behind the hoardings was Martin’s sidings with room for 36 coal waggons. This was on land belonging to Martins Dairy at 4 Endwell Road, leased to leased to the London North West Railway and sub let to coal merchant Charrington Warren Ltd.
The steps at right lead to the side entrance to Endwell Court, a block features in my previous post.
Josies Cafe was next to the railway bridge on Mantle Road which is at the right of the picture. There was still a café here (no longer Josie’s) until around 2010, but since then this has been a small empty plot.
Josies Cafe seen from the opposite side of Mantle Road with the grassy bank leading up to the goods line which crosses Mantle Road here.
Brockley Paper Co, Mantle Rd, Brockley, Lewisham, 1990, 90-3f-35
I think this building housing the Brockley Paper Co was next to Josies Cafe, and has been demolished and replaced by a block of flats with shops on the ground floor. One of these at 1a Mantle Road is now the London Print Shop.
This small row was just south of Foxwell Road and you can see the railway bridge in the distance at right and the sign for Josies Cafe.
This block which included The Maypole Inn whose sign can be seen was demolished before 2008 – the pub closed in 2006. A block of flats was built on the northern part of the site around 2012, but I don’t know where the ‘low cost flats’ advertised here were located.
I walked to the other side of Brockley Station over the station footbridge and along Coulgate Street to Brockley Road and into Harefield Road. The building in the centre background is the back of a house on the corner of Foxberry Street and Coulgate Street,.
This post began with two men, so I’ll end it with two women who walked in front of me to cross the road as I was looking at the graffiti on the wall at the read of the corner shop.
This had the message ‘FREE WINSTON SILCOTT’ above a lot of less legible scrawls. Silcott was one of the ‘Tottenham 3‘ convicted in 1987 for the murder of PC Keith Blakelock on the Broadwater Farm Estate in Tottenham in October 1985, but had been nowhere near the scened. All three convictions were quashed in 1991 after it was found the police had fabricated their confessions. He remained in jail as he was convicted for an unrelated murder of a boxer and nightclub bouncer and was only released in 2003.
Carnival, Political Prisoners & Naked Bike Ride: On Saturday 14th June 2008 I called in at Hampton Hill on my way into London for the 30th annual Hampton Hill & Hampton Carnival Parade, but it turned out to be a rather small event. In Trafalgar Square there was a protest outside South Africa House calling for the release of political prisoners held in prisons around the world and after this I went to Hyde Park for the start of the London World Naked Bike Ride.
Hampton & Hampton Hill 30th Anniversary Parade
Hampton Hill
In Hampton Hill I found cows on the High Street and a large rabbit as well as a few cars and some people on foot including a gardener with a wheelbarrow, but it was a small and rather disappointing parade and I left to continue my journey to London as it made its way towards Hampton.
The protest here was also rather smaller than I had hoped but included a group of Kurds calling for the release of their leader, Abdullah Ocalan from a Turkish jail.
Others called for the release of the Miami Five, Cubans who came to Miami to disrupt terrorist raids made by right-wing Cuban exiles living there against Cuba and imprisoned by the USA.
There were also calls for the closure of the illegal US prison camp at Guantanamo Bay and for an end to the continuing torture there and release of refugees and asylum seekers locked in detention centres in the UK.
In 2008 the London World Naked Bike Ride began in Hyde Park, and I went there to photograph the riders getting ready and setting off. The start was very crowded mainly with tourists eager to view the spectacle.
When all had left I took the tube to Westminster to photograph the ride going over Westminster Bridge and then as the ride regrouped I rushed to the footbridge into Waterloo Station (now demolished) for pictures from above as it came down York Road. As the last cyclist passed below me I walked into the station to catch my train home.
As I commented “while bodies are very much on display environmental messages seemed at times to be rather well-hidden, leaving many of the public along the route bemused.” And on My London Diary I recount briefly the reactions of some of the people I talked to and heard as we watched the event.
Those organising the ride say it is a “peaceful, imaginative and fun protest against oil dependency and car culture. A celebration of the bicycle and also a celebration of the power and individuality of the human body. A symbol of the vulnerability of the cyclist in traffic.”
The annual ride continues to take place in London and in other cities. The 2026 London ride is today, Sunday 14th June 2026. Riders are starting from Clapham Junction, Croydon, Deptford, Hackney Wick, Kew Bridge, Regents Park, Tower Hill, Hyde Park Corner and all meeting up close to the south end of Westminster Bridge to ride together around Central London.
Arms Dealers, Dirty Oil and Pay: On Thursday 13th Jun 2013 a protest in the week before the G8 summit in Ireland targeted the offices of arms manufacturers in London. Unlike the previous day the protesters were not harassed and attacked by police and the protest remained peaceful.
Canadian prime minster Stephen Harper had been invited to address Parliament and there was a noisy protest against him over his support of the environmentally disastrous Canadian tar sands as well as a smaller group of Canadian Foreign Service Workers demanding equal pay with other Canadian government employees.
I also briefly photographed the continuing daily vigil calling for the release of Shaker Aamer from Guantanamo which I had written about earlier.
G8 Protest Against Arms Dealers
West End
Anti-G8 protesters continued their protests with a tour of the offices of companies making armaments in Central London. Today their peaceful protest, unlike yesterday’s, was not attacked by police, and there were no arrests.
As well as a group of protesters in black robes with ghost or skull masks and carrying mock scythes and a black banner with the message ‘Think we’re SCARY? You’ll find ‘ARMS DEALERS INSIDE‘, there were others calling attention to UK based arms companies including BAE and EDO and the huge DSEi arms fair held in London’s Docklands.
Some changed into white plastic overalls suitable for a ‘weapons inspection’ as the protest began outside the offices of UK’s largest arms manufacturer BAE in Carlton Gardens. BAE is the third largest arms company in the world and notable for several corruption cases – and they have been fined £48.7m by the US government for braking their military export laws. Speeches here gave brief details about their immoral and sometimes illegal activities.
The protest moved on to give similar performances outside the offices of other arms companies:
Thales, the world’s 11 largest arms company with a wide range of surveillance equipment, drones, armoured vehicles, missiles and more.
Lockheed Martin UK – the British arm of the world’s largest arms producer, making fighters, bombs, nuclear weapons and involved with the CIA and FBI.
Northrop Grumman UK, one of the world’s largest defence contractors and the largest builder of naval vessels
missile developer MBDA
QinetiQ, a major defence contractor which manufactures drones and armed robots used in Afghanistan and Iraq.
They also protested outside Charing Cross Police Station where those arrested at the previous day’s J11 Carnival against Capitalism had been taken.
Canadian PM Stephen Harper was invited to address the UK Parliament as he had a special relationship with UK PM David Cameron, both trying with the support of British Oil companies such as Shell and BP to force the EU to accept oil from the Albertan tar sands. And this protest took place as he spoke.
Canadian campaigners say Harper “has spent the last few years promoting the destructive tar sands industry, eroding Indigenous rights, weakening environmental regulations, muzzling scientists, and helping keep the world fixed on a collision course with runaway climate change by pulling out of the Kyoto Protocol.” They say his “government is currently mired in scandal and sleaze” and ask: “What was the UK thinking in extending this invitation?”
The protest was supported by all the leading environmental groups in the UK, and around a hundred protesters came to chanted in protest as this ‘climate criminal, addressed the UK Parliament shouting slogans including “Don’t say no thank you! Say No Tar!” and “Stephen Harper off our soil; We don’t want your dirty oil!”
A few yards down the road from Parliament Square a much smaller group of protesters had come to greet the Canadian Prime Minister, mainly dressed in suits.
The Professional Association of Foreign Service Workers representing men and women working for the Canadian Government here and around the world had come to demand demanding equal pay for equal work. They say other Canadian government employees doing the exact same jobs as them are paid up to $14,000 a year more.
Brexit, Fair Tips & Deported Cleaners: On Tuesday 12 June 2018 after photographing the Stand of Defiance European Movement continuing protest outside Parliament I went on to a protest at the Business ministry calling for restaurant staff to receive all of the tips that clients add to their bills. Finally I went to SOAS where a rally was taking place on the 9th anniversary of the management conspiring with the Border Agency in a despicable anti-union move to deport nine of the cleaners who worked there.
Stop Brexit ‘Pies Not Lies’
Old Palace Yard, Westminster
Steven Bray’s Stand of Defiance European Movement, SODEM, were continuing their protests outside Parliament every day it was in session.
This protest was a part of their ‘Pies Not Lies Remainathon‘ and was taking place as parliament were debating the European Union (Withdrawal) Bill.
They continue to point out that he public was misled by deliberate lies and say that Brexit does not reflect the will of the people as few if any of the 52% actually voted for the kind of hard Brexit that the government is pursuing.
Striking Unite members from TGI Fridays along with others from the Unite Restaurant, Catering and Bar Workers Branch and Unite Community came to the Department of Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy to protest against restaurant owners taking part of the tips that customers give to staff on their credit cards.
The workers say TGI Fridays use the tips to drive down the pay of staff in kitchens, and demand to keep the tips they have earned and for proper pay for all restaurant staff.
One of the protesters was dressed as a giant burger. After half an hour of noisy protest, a deputation tried to go in to deliver a letter to business secretary Greg Clark, but were stopped at the door, where their letter was taken with a promise it would be delivered to him.
Two years earlier then then Business minister Sajid Javid had promised to take action to end this malpractice but had done nothing. Five years later The Employment (Allocation of Tips) Act 2023 made it law that all tips should go to the workers and a code of practice for this was issued in July 2024.
I left as the protest at the ministry was ending and the group were going on to protest outside branches of TGI Fridays.
On 12th June 2009, after the cleaners at SOAS had begun to campaign for the London Living Wage, SOAS managers called them to an ’emergency meeting’ at 6:30am.
Consuela, one of the cleaner’s shop stewards
A few minutes after the start of the ‘meeting’, agents of the UK Border Agency rushed in, handcuffed all the cleaners and held them for questioning. Nine were then deported.
The was part of the despicable ‘hostile environment’ for migrant workers, begun by the Labour government, but severely ratcheted up by Theresa May as Home Secretary.
People stood at the rally in front of SOAS holding the names of the 9 deported cleaners – Alberto, Carlos, Heidy, Laura, Lucia, Manuel, Marina, Milton and Rosa – while people told the story of that grim day and about the long fight by cleaners to get a Living Wage, decent conditions of service and to be treated with dignity and respect.
Sandy Nicoll, SOAS Unison Branch Secretary
In 2018 that ten year ‘one workplace, one workforce’ struggle to bring the cleaners ‘in house’, directly employed by the university, had just been won in principle and negotiations were continuing on its implementation.
Lenin, another cleaners shop steward
After the rally there was to be a showing of the documentary film ‘Limpiadores’ about the SOAS cleaners and the Borders Agency raid with a panel discussion, but I couldn’t stay. I don’t think the film is still available.
News of the World & Police Forest Gate Raid: On Sunday 11th June 2006 a protest took place outside the News International printing works in Wapping a week after its staff had tricked migrants in East London by making fake job promises and then transporting them by bus to an immigration detention centre. This was one of many outrages by the newspaper, which was finally forced to close in 2011 by the many revelations about its involvement in illegal phone hacking.
Later in the day there was a larger protest at New Scotland Yard against a massive police raid by 250 police on a home in Forest Gate in which one of two men arrested was shot and wounded by police. Police also forcefully raided a neighbouring house, and the whole local area was shut down for several days. Police were acting on a rumour that this was a terrorist bomb factory but no chemical materials were found and the two men were released seven days later without charge.
Here is what I wrote back in 2006 about these with some pictures from the protests.
No Borders Protest at Wapping
News of the World, Wapping
Demonstrators outside the gate to Fortress Wapping
Last Sunday the ‘News Of The World’ bragged about how a team of its staff had made fake offers of work to migrants, picking on the weakest and most exploited people living here with us. They had then picked them up in a bus and taken them without their consent to the Colnbrook Detention Centre, where they were handed over to immigration officers and detained.
I hope their actions will be condemned by my union (the NUJ) as a disgrace to journalism, and endangering relations between genuine reporters and migrants. Such deception should not be tolerated by anyone, and the would seem to amount to kidnapping.
All of us should be appalled that this was allowed to happen – and that apparently the authorities connived in it rather than turning the buses away as they should have done.
Colnbrook detainees made their feelings about the person who organised the scam clear “You are a gutless, incompetent, bully” and pointed out that it was such “unfair ill-informed reporting” that was responsible for the adoption of inhuman policies that led to migrants not claiming asylum and hiding from the authorities, which left them open to exploitation by unscrupulous employers, with long hours, low pay and poor and dangerous working conditions.
‘Intelligence or Negligence – That is the Question!’ read some of the placards
A crowd of several hundred demonstrators, mainly Muslim, gathered outside New Scotland Yard on Sunday afternoon, 11th June 2006, to voice their disquiet at the June 2nd police raid in Forest Gate.
George Galloway speaks to reporters
Speakers from across the Muslim community as well as Respect MP George Galloway and Lindsey German of ‘Stop The War’ expressed their misgivings at the heavy-handed approach of the police and the targeting of Muslims. There were calls for the resignation of the Metropolitan Police chief, Sir Ian Blair. Many also called for Tony Blair to go.
Certainly there should be some rapid re-thinking of how (and why) any further such raids are carried out. I’d always assumed that when the police kicked down my front door at 4 am they would at least shout out something like ‘Police – get on the floor’ as they stormed in rather than leave me to think they were an armed criminal gang. And while I might expect them to restrain me, shooting me or and kicking me in the head without very good reason surely should result in a criminal conviction?
A rather grudging apology dragged out over a week after the event isn’t good enough. Of course there are enquiries going on, but the police have to show some sensitivity. [Later the officers concerned were cleared of any “criminal or disciplinary offence“.]
Several speakers made the point that ‘police intelligence’ was in almost all respects woefully lacking. All of us are put at danger – as last year’s London bombings showed – because police waste time and resources on false rumours such as those behind this raid. One speaker went through a long, long list of such happenings around the country, including some the police still persist in believing despite having cases thrown out by the courts.
The event attracted major media attention; it was hard to get an accurate estimate of the number of demonstrators because there were so many reporters and photographers etc present. Along with a core of 250, representing the number of police involved in the raid, there were probably a hundred or more others.
Wikipedia states: “The Metropolitan Police revealed under freedom of information legislation that what was known as Operation Volga had cost £2,211,600, including £864,300 on overtime payments for the dozens of police officers involved, £90,000 on hotel bills, and £120,000 for repairs to the damage caused to the houses by the police.”
Less than 95 theses: In June 2005 I was in Poland for the first FotoArtFestival in Bielsko-Biala where I had been invited to show my work and also to give a couple of talks. While I was there I photographed Poland’s only statue of Martin Luther, and this inspired me to write my ‘Less than 95 theses‘ on photography with which I began one of my talks.
Martin Luther, Bielsko-Biala
The pictures here all come from my few days in Bielsko-Biala and will include some of the other photographers who were there. You can read a little more about the festival in the previous post – and in online my FotoArtFestival Diary from 2005.
Madames et Messieurs
English owes its prominence not only to US (and earlier UK) global economic and political domination, but to its flexibility and adaptability, which we systematically abuse.
Translation is a valiant attempt at the often impossible. Language operates at various sublevels of denotation and connotation, through allusion. It depends on shared experiences and understandings that are often very different.
Fortunately, communication happens, and it often happens most strongly across the crevasses between our languages as we struggle for understanding. We understand not from the smooth inter-meshing of gears than transmits the everyday niceties, but from the strands that stick in our teeth or the grit that lodges and may grow into a pearl. Or simply give us sore feet.
Yesterday I met an Angel
Yesterday I met an angel. Two angels to be precise, not on the head of a pin, but in Bielsko. Around 8 foot tall, dressed in white and the regulation pair of wings each, and she gave me a photograph and a feathered flower.
Inez and Andrzej Baturo at the opening ceremony at the Bielskie Centrum Kultury
But Bielsko is the city of angels, because I met another one on Thursday evening. Inez, I appreciate from the depths of my heart all you have done for the festival. To borrow the words of one of my great musical heroes, “We love you madly.“
[I think the official Polish translation for that last paragraph was something like ‘Peter thanks Inez for all her work on the festival.”]
This Morning, Luther
This morning I went in search of Poland’s only statue of Martin Luther, in a small clump of trees in Plac Lutra.
This address begins for real with me nailing a few of my photographic theses to the door – fortunately rather fewer than his 95 – and saying ‘Here I stand, I can do no other‘ – at least until I’ve had a few more beers – ‘God help me, Amen.’
Less than 95 theses
Gunars Binde from Latvia
First, with apologies to Gunars Binde, a lovely man with fantastical pictures to match who told us we shouldn’t write about pictures. Bullshit! But then I would say that wouldn’t I (MRDA as we say in some English circles – ‘Mandy Rice-Davies applies.’)
Good writing about photography is as rare as hen’s teeth. The problem with most writing about photography is that it is not writing about photography, refusing to confront either process or product.
Good writing is a difficult feat and I stand with awe, marvelling at the skills of people such as John Szarkowski and Robert Adams. Just occasionally – and it’s most gratifying – I receive an email from a photographer that tells me I’ve made them realise new things about their work.
Antanas Sutkus, Ami Vitale and Stefan Bremer
Its no coincidence that the Szarkowski and Adams are both photographers as well as writers. I’ve always considered that the people who know most about our medium are the people who do it. Those who have written most cogently have all had at least a reasonable proficiency at it and a firm grounding in its traditions.
Of course there are also plenty of good photographers who have not been able to articulate in any way about the medium, and some who have talked nonsense. But in so far as photography has attracted serious criticism rather than critical indifference, there are many to whom my response is simply that they have not paid their dues.
Fears: Fear of Truth – Pilar Albajar from Spain
Visual language, some say, is universal. More bullshit. No two of us looking at a picture see the same picture. Yes, there will be some common perceptions that arise from our shared cultural and sub-cultural soup, but the way that we interpret the visual is critically dependent on our culture, our history.
For a trivial example, a triangle in England is simply a triangle, while in Poland it can signify and classify a toilet. Symbols such as the cross and swastika can also differ radically in meaning, for example between Hindu, Christian and Muslim.
Bullshit 3 is truth, or at least the idea that photojournalists and documentary photographers are on a mission to uncover it. Point of view is fundamental to photography. Literally and metaphorically.
Bevis Fusha photographs me
Watching people photograph the proceedings earlier, photographers on the unfamiliar end of the lens, Bevis Fusha commented that digital cameras made it hard to tell amateur from professional, we all use the same equipment now.
But it isn’t the camera that matters. Working professionally (whether as amateur or pro) come down to point of view. Deciding what you want to say (metaphor) and getting in the right place to do it (literal.) Then of course there is knowing how to hold the camera – and a little luck.
Shadi Ghadirian talks about the problems of being a photographer in Iran
Some months ago in one of those phone interviews where they work through a standard list of questions, a journo from and amateur photo mag came to “What is your favourite photo accessory?” I don’t think my answer, “Ten thousand miles of shoe leather” made it to print.
Another on my camera I didn’t take
Truth is seldom simple. Facts look different depending where you come from. Photographers lack – and really need to lack – the Divine guidance needed for certainty. At best we have a personal integrity, an open mind and an honest vision. And make pictures that reflect the complexities of the real world. Photography is an iceberg. Nine-tenths is underwater, hidden from view. Occasionally parts of that great mass break away and float to the surface – as when the work of Mike Disfarmer was published by Julia Scully and others.
Its instructive to think what a history or overview of photography written in the 1920s or 1930s might have looked like. We can be fairly sure that some of those who would have featured most prominently, for example, William Mortensen, author of Pictorial Lighting, 1932, Projection Control, 1934, Monster & Madonnas: A Book of Methods, 1936, The Command to Look, 1937, The Model, 1937 and more, are among those now largely relegated to footnotes, while the photographer many of us would regard as the most important of the early years of the century, Eugene Atget, would not have got a mention.
There are many photographers who are not particularly well-known whose work is of interest, and often of rather more interest than some of those who have made the history books. Fame is about being in the right place at the right time and knowing the right people.
Ami Vitale
Photography is not an American medium, nor does it belong to Dusseldorf. Much of the most interesting things that are happening in photography now take place away from these centres. Despite the efforts of historians and authors – such as Naomi Rosenblum – we still have a very long way to go in discovering twentieth century photography outside of the United States of America. (I wonder how much space Polish photography gets in her latest ‘World History’, being promoted during this festival.)
I’m ashamed to have written virtually nothing on Polish photography to date. However In my features on the web site ‘About Photography’ [1999 until 2007 when I was sacked for writing about photography] I try to show a world view of photography, for example with the series of features on photography in Central and South America. Along with the work of many others these have helped shine a little light on photography in this vibrant and active region.
Eikoh Hosoe
In a very real sense there is no such thing as ‘a photographer’. We don’t exist in isolation. Our often fragile and fraught egos (often seen as evidence of artistic temperament) belie what we all know, that we are a part of a community. Our ideas, our pictures, build on the shoulders of others. Becoming a photographer is very much about connecting with this community. My talk is a very personal one, about some of the people – famous and relatively unknown – who have been important in my life and my photography.
This event in Bielsko-Biala is a powerful manifestation of that community, and one that has transcended our different nationalities, languages and status. The friendship, the fellowship I’ve felt here has moved me to the very bowels of my heart. But this is a community which I think is now under threat in two respects.
Photography for the media is becoming more and more a corporate business rather than an artistic endeavour. Mega-image corporations aim to monopolise image supply, cutting supermarket-style deals with photographers and image buyers, dragging down prices below that needed to sustain an individual approach.
In the fine art world, artists become increasing synthetic, predicated by the demands of the market (for example for limited editions in our essentially infinitely replicable medium.)
I am very much a grass roots person, a believer in participation as the basis of building better lives and a better society. What really matters is the ordinary and the vernacular, although when we examine them closely we find that they are very particular. We can perhaps learn far more about the real history of photography by looking at those who have not made the history books.
FotoArtFestival Diary: Back in June 2005 I was at the first FotoArtFestival taking place in Bielsko-Biala, Poland. This was an international festival with exhibitions featuring one photographer from each of 25 countries, including some of my post-industrial urban images from London. But the pictures in this post are some of the colour pictures I made during my visit to Poland on a compact digital camera.
I was also there to give a couple of talks. As well a presentation on my own work I also talked about the work of other photographers from the UK, including Raymond Moore, Tony Ray-Jones and some personal friends including the London-resident American John Benton-Harris, Paul Baldesare, Derek Ridgers and Mike Seaborne.
I hadn’t really anticipated the problem of translation, and although both festival organiser Inez and another translator did their best to translate my talks into Polish, it meant that the talks took more than twice as long with me having to wait between paragraphs for them to repeat my sentences in Polish.
The on-screen presentations which accompanied my talks consisted almost entirely of pictures. When I went back two years later I had prepared a presentation with key phrases and captions along with the pictures and a much shorter text for the translators. But for this occasion I had to edit my presentations on the hoof, leaving out or précising some whole sections to keep within the time allowed. But you can download the full versions (without images) online.
My talks, given in English but translated into Polish, must have gone down well, as I was invited back to speak again at the second FotoArtFestival. And John Benton-Harris was invited to show work at that, while the gallery in nearby Krakov (whose director was in my audience and who I had a long conversation with) put on a show of the work of Tony Ray-Jones.
After I returned home I published my FotoArtFestival Diary which is still on-line, with many of the pictures I took during my stay. I had a fantastic time there and it was particularly great to meet many other photographers there, including some of those whose work was also on show.
Here is an extract from that diary with more about the festival and the start of my ‘Thoughts from Bielsko‘ I wrote while there.
FotoArtFestival
The festival set out to invite the best photographers in various fields from around the world, and included some well-known names – such as Eikoh Hosoe, Ami Vitale, Boris Mikhajlov and Malick Sidibe, as well as many rising stars and a few of those no longer with us, Mario Giacomelli, Inge Morath and Robert Diament.
The 26 major shows represented work from 25 countries – just one photographer from each, with a group show of older Polish photo-reportage. It was truly an effort to be international, although concentrating on European countries, including Albania, Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Holland, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Russia, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Turkey, the Ukraine and of course the UK, as well Iran, Japan, Mali, South Africa and the USA. France and Switzerland were also represented, with a representative from Magnum and a presentation on the work of Werner Bischof.
Thoughts from Bielsko
Gatwick and Hell
I hate travelling, especially travelling by air. Endless waiting in arid lounges, surrounded by retail irrelevance, shops of pointless and unwanted items.
It’s an enforced spell of purgatory, with what must be the most infuriating announcements ever devised to punish the lost souls, “Please enjoy the facilities in the lounge” in an irritatingly banal false female voice. You realise Douglas Adams travelled this way.
Eventually we are allowed to go through the departure gate, for yet another spell of waiting until we can clamber into a bus to be driven across the apron to the waiting jet.
After take-off I try to see where we are heading. The first place I can definitely place is Canvey island on the Thames estuary where I was taking pictures a couple of months back.
Two hours later we are bumping down through the clouds and into Krakow airport. Fortunately this is so small it takes a relatively short time to collect my case and go through to meet the driver who is to drive me and another festival visitor, Marta Daho of Magnum, to Bielsko-Biala.
Life Imitates Art
Life imitates Art,
Art Imitates Nature.
Nature abhors a vacuum,
Hoovers suck.
Life? Well, sometimes it happens.
Always it happens, magic or shit.
Bielsko was brimming with magic.
I Translate
I translate
It rans late
And everything did run late, due to the tremendous enthusiasm of the audience to the presentations by all the photographers who had come to talk about their work. In a later post here I’ll post part of an introduction to my talk which I wrote in my hotel room in Bielsko-Biala, as well as some more pictures including some of the other photographers taking part in the festival. And I even did a little translating although the remnants of my ‘O Level’ French wasn’t really up to it.
Gravesend and Northfleet, Kent: Twenty years ago on Thursday 8th June 2006 I took my folding bike by train to Gravesend and spent an afternoon cycling through the area on the Kent bank of the River Thames, long home to the cement industry – the manufacture of ‘Portland Cement’ began here in 1834.
Looking across the cement works at Northfleet to Tilbury docks
I’d long had an interest in the area, both for its industrial history and for its sometimes spectacular landscapes created by this. I was first inspired when I borrowed an old book from my local library, Donald Maxwell’s ‘A Pilgrimage of the Thames‘, published in 1932. His accounts and sketches, some first published earlier in the Church Times present an interesting and romantic view of places and people along the river beginning at Gravesend and ending at Oxford.
Maxwell (1877-1936) reports a Thames pilot telling him as he sketched on a jetty, “The principal products of Gravesend are paper, cement and smoke – especially smoke.”
Later, writing about Northfleet he muses prophetically “One day, when the cement industry has left this valley, and centres of population have shifted, this district will be called the Switzerland of England, and weekend châlets, each with its aeroplane-landing on the cliff, will look down once again upon green shores and tree-embowered banks.”
Henley’s Cable Works Offices
It hasn’t happened quite like that, though the cement industry has gone and there are some luxury riverside flats and the new town of Ebbsfleet developing around a new station on the Channel Tunnel Rail Link (which Eurostar trains whizz through non-stop at around the same speed as aircraft when Maxwell wrote.)
A footbridge over a chalk ravine left by quarrying
Of course Maxwell’s book was not my only source for information about the area. Particularly useful was the 1971 geography text ‘Lower Thameside‘ by Roy Millward & Adrian Robinson with its chapter ‘The Cement Industry of Lower Thameside‘ which gave some rather more precise information and a suggested itinerary which informed my first actual visits to the area in the 1980s.
A few years after I took these pictures in 2006 the vast cement works at Northfleet had gone.
The photographs on My London Diary are not captioned (and I wrote nothing about them) but a they are in order of my ride beginning in Gravesend and moving west, with views across the Thames to Tilbury. From Rosherville I moved on to Northfleet (where Gravesend & Northfleet FC is now Ebbsfleet United) and then on to take the train home from Swanscombe.
