I’d forgotten when I wrote yesterday’s post that I had actually taken some colour pictures as well as the black and white of Notting Hill Carnival in 1990. I was then working in colour with colour negative film and I think the colour in some of these images is a little on the drab side. I think I found them less interesting than the black and white.
Notting Hill 1990
Notting Hill 1990
Notting Hill 1990
Notting Hill 1990
Notting Hill 1990
Notting Hill 1990
Notting Hill 1990
Notting Hill 1990
As usual, clicking on any of the images will take you to a larger version in the album, and you can also browse the other images in it. You can find colour from other years in the album as well, though in a rather strange order as I found them.
This weekend should have been Notting Hill Carnival. But not this year thanks to Covid. I’ll post instead a few pictures from earlier years over the next few days. The first time I photographed there was in 1990, and I was only taking pictures in black and white.
Notting Hill Carnival 1990
Notting Hill Carnival 1990
Notting Hill Carnival 1990
Notting Hill Carnival 1990
Notting Hill Carnival 1990
Notting Hill Carnival 1990
Notting Hill Carnival 1990
These and more are from my album ‘Notting Hill Carnival – the 1990s’ and clicking on any of the images above will take you to a larger version in the album, from where you can browse the rest of the collection.
All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated, are taken by and copyright of Peter Marshall, and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.
Years ago much of my photography was of public events other than protests, partly because there seemed to be fewer protests, or perhaps it was simply harder to find out about when and where they were taking place.
Although social media existed, back in 2005 few groups that were organising protests had began to make much use of it. There were some groups that had web sites on which they published information, and a few wider organisations, particularly Indymedia that had some listings but finding information was still largely a matter of reading printed newsletters and flyposted posters along with lengthy sessions on the web, going through a long list of web sites and searching – and back in 2005 Google had just begun to be the hugely dominant search engine.
But I was also more interested in cultural events, both traditional English events and those that had been brought to us by our migrant communities. And in London many events involved people from all across our now very varied communities, whether their roots were in this country or abroad.
Cultural events change more slowly than political events, and many, particularly religious events tend to follow a set pattern and become less interesting to photograph for me. Though I might still enjoy going, for example, to Notting Hill Carnival after perhaps a dozen times I found I had little new to say. Though it was a knee injury that prevented me from getting there in 2005. I dragged myself painfully to the station, but fell down in agony on the steps and decided it wasn’t a year for dancing and began the painful journey home.
Earlier in the month I’d accompanied fellow photographers to a couple of more traditional English carnivals in Hayling Island and in Hastings, as well as photographing the Shoreditch Festival Parade and the Latino Carnaval del Pueblo in Southwark. The pictures in this post come from those events. That month I also found time to visit Brian Haw and to cover another protest in Parliament Square over new protest laws and one calling for a tax on foreign currency exchange transactions.
Back in 2005, My London Diary was in a slightly less developed state. My comments were still all in lowercase and there are no links to individual events. And although all the pictures on-line are digital colour I also took some pictures in medium format on black and white film.
In 2008 I took part in a show with 3 other photographers, English Carnival, and the web site from this remains on-line. My pictures are a black and white set from Notting Hill in 1990-2001, but those by the others – Paul Baldesare, Dave Trainer and Bob Watkins – are from traditional English events, and include several taken at events I was also photographing.
All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated, are taken by and copyright of Peter Marshall, and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.
All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated, are taken by and copyright of Peter Marshall, and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.
Another set of pictures from the 1997 Notting Hill Carnival.
Various organisations take part in carnival, including religious groups, notably The Nation of Islam,
and some trade unions who show a little more of the carnival spirit.
It’s a time for dancing on the streets, and at times its difficult to hold the camera steady, with music you don’t just hear but which sets your internal organs vibrating and even the tarmac under your feet.
It’s hard to capture the intensity of the event, and a kind of glorious disorder on the streets.
Some people are insistent that I take their picture – and of course I oblige.
But it all gets a bit too much for some. And after some hours I get to feel rather like this and decide to go home and rest. Because after the Children’s Day on the Sunday comes the main day on Monday when the streets are more crowded and the dancing more frenetic.
All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated, are taken by and copyright of Peter Marshall, and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.
Here are a few more from Ladbroke Grove in 1997, I think all from the first day of the event, the Children’s Day on the Sunday.
I think all of these pictures were taken with a 28mm or 35mm lens, probably on a Minolta CLE (the improved successor to the Leica CL) using Fuji Super G 400 colour negative film.
I did take more photographs of the children, but while the costumes may be cute and sometimes very colourful (though not in this example) they generally lack the exhuberance of older revellers and I found them of less interest. There are more of the children in the album on Flickr.
I took several pictures of this young woman holding a child as she danced beside one of the floats pumping out fairly deafening music, and this one I think shows her and the child both enjoying the moment.
But the second frame puts her better into the whole siuation, part of the crowd moving down the street with the lorry.
All these pictures were taken within a few minutes of each other, and I made many more during the two days of carnival – and will post more another day. As usual you can see any of them larger in the album by clicking on them – and can then continue to view more if you wish.
All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated, are taken by and copyright of Peter Marshall, and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.
I find it hard to believe I took no colour pictures at Notting Hill Carnival in 1996, but if I did I cannot find the negatives, though it is possible that they are somewhere in my loft, still in the envelope with the prints as they came back from the processing lab. I did go to carnival, and made some black and white images, but probably I had come to a decision not to work in colour.
The following year, 1997, I’ve found no very few black and white negatives, perhaps just when I was finishing off a couple of films still in the cameras, and nothing of any real interest, but a note on the contact sheet tells me that I worked in colour that year. So here are some of the results.
I’ll post another set from 1997 shortly, but you can see them all in my album Notting Hill Carnival – the 1990s which has around 80 more pictures from that year. As usual, clicking on the images in this post will take you to the image in the album – much larger for the landscape format images.
All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated, are taken by and copyright of Peter Marshall, and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.
In 1994 I set out to photograph carnival both in black and white and in colour, and while my colour images concentrate on the people in the procession and their costumes, it was a little more varied than in previous years, with more overlap with the black and white work.
So I took some pictures of the people watching the carnival in colour and perhaps rather more than in previous years where the carnival was the background rather than the main subject.
I was working with colour negative film, and exposures were a little more critical than with black and white, which has greater latitude. There are some I could not get good prints from in the darkroom, and although digitising makes it a little easier there are still some where the colour is not as good as I would like.
But despite these problems I was encouraged by the results , and the following year for various reasons photographed Notting Hill almost entirely in colour.
There are around 60 colour pictures from 1994 beginning some way down page 6 of my Notting Hill in the 90s album and continuing onto the next page. Clicking on any of the pictures above will also take you to larger versions in this album.
All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated, are taken by and copyright of Peter Marshall, and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.
Although I’d been making the occasional panoramic image over the years, taking a series of pictures and painstakingly cutting and pasting several prints to produce a seldom quite convincing join, it was only late in 1991 that I finally bought a camera capable of taking true panoramic images.
It’s hard now to imagine how difficult it was to produce panoramic images back in those pre-digital days – unless you could afford an expensive panoramic camera. Nowadays many cheaper digital cameras come with a ‘panoramic’ mode (though I’ve never managed to use one to produce an image that survived close scrutiny) and both specialised “stitching” software and more general programs such as Photoshop make joining several frames just a matter of a few clicks.
It was the Soviet Union, and Krasnogorsky Mechanicheskiy Zavod (KMZ) that first introduced a reasonably priced panoramic camera to a wider audience, with the Horizont, available from 1966-73, but at the time I wasn’t interested in panoramic photography. Like their Zenith SLR cameras which I started serious photography with this was pretty basic and had a possibly undeserved reputation as being something of a problem to use.
When I bought my first panoramic camera in 1991 it was a Japanese model, a Widelux F8, a similar swing lens camera to the Horizont but with a wider 140 degree angle of view and rather smoother operation. It was also considerably more expensive and I think cost me almost a month’s salary.
Although the camera worked smoothly, its viewfinder was abysmal, and I made landscape pictures with the camera on a tripod and using two arrows showing the field of view on the top of the camera body, with a spirit level in the accessory shoe to level the camera. But for the carnival and similar images of events I used it handheld.
In later years I bought the revised version of the Russian camera, now with a similar mechanism encased in a plastic body and called Horizon (there were several slightly different models.) The viewfinder was so much better than than Widelux and thankfully incorporated a spirit bubble – and the cameras were less than a tenth of the price (I used at least two over the years, one ridiculously cheap from a clearly illegal operation in the Ukraine, evading any customs duties.)
The only colour images I can find from Notting Hill Carnival in 1992 were taken with the Widelux, and appear to have been taken in two relatively short periods, one on Ladbroke Grove and the other on Elkstone Rd. There are some more, some rather similar to those in this post, in my Flickr album Notting Hill Panoramas -1992.
All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated, are taken by and copyright of Peter Marshall, and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.
In 1991 I photographed Carnival in both black and white and in colour. I went on both days, but I think it was only on Sunday, the Children’s Day, that I took any colour pictures. Nearly all were taken on Ladbroke Grove as the floats and groups went down, often stopping for quite long periods.
I’ll post a few pictures here, but there are quite a few in the album, Notting Hill Carnival – the 1990s, starting at this one if you want to see more.
The picture above is the last colour image from 1991 in the album.
All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated, are taken by and copyright of Peter Marshall, and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.
