Free Tibet March: On Saturday 9th March 2002 I photographed the annual Free Tibet march and a short time later put some of the photographs online on My London Diary.
I wrote only a very short text for My London Diary then – here it is in full (re-capitalised):
9 March was the occasion of an annual march from the Chinese Embassy to Whitehall to protest against Chinese occupation of Tibet. Among those taking part were those who had been imprisoned by the Chinese for their protests in Tibet.
Back then the library I was sending pictures to only accepted prints or transparencies of colour pictures and I was only then working with colour negative film.
But I did take colour pictures, knowing that they would at some time be a part of a historical record of protest, along with my black and white pictures.
Financially it wasn’t worth me making colour prints, which was a rather slower, more expensive and rather trickier business than printing in black and white – even though I had an expensive colour enlarger and C-Type roller transport line in my darkroom. Many newspapers and magazines were then still totally or largely in black and white and sales were unlikely to cover costs.
But of course things were rapidly changing, and publication quality digital cameras were arriving on the market at affordable prices. By the end of 2002 I working with my first DSLR, a Nikon D100, and soon I was able to write files out to a CD and take those to the library.
But there were sometimes still advantages to working in black and white. In colour the Tibetan protests were dominated by the strong colours of the Tibetan flag which gave every image something of the same look.
And the 6.2Mp RAW files from the Nikon couldn’t quite produce the same quality as black and white film, though good enough for press and magazine work. As digital cameras and processing software both improved though, it soon became possible to produce digital files that could more or less match or better than those from film and eventually I switched to work only on digital.
The pictures here were put on the web in 2002 by scanning 8×10 silver gelatin prints on my flatbed scanner which I filed at around 32Mp files – a size I think I wasn’t able to achieve with a digital camera until over 10 years later. The quality was also better than the files from my first film scanner.
The pictures here are all those I put online in 2002, though I probably took over 200 black and white images. But I would only print and scan those I wanted to submit. At the moment I am going though my many years of working on film and digitising rather more to put on Flickr and the Internet archive, though it will be a few years before I get to doing this for my 2002 work.
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