Tag: internet archive

London Pride 2004

London Pride: I think the Pride March on Saturday 3rd July 2004 was around the 12th Pride I had photographed and I was certainly beginning to feel it had lost the edge it had in the earlier years. It’s now some years since I bothered to apply for accreditation to cover the annual event, and didn’t bother to apply for one of the armbands my union were offering. It’s perhaps ten years since I last went.

London Pride 2004

I used to enjoy photographing the annual event, and you can see many of my pictures from those years on the Internet Archive and in the Café Royal Books publication ‘Pride Not Profit – London 1993–2000‘. I had a small show of some of the work at the Museum of London and a larger selection was projected as part of the Museum’s travelling show ‘Queer is Here‘ which began with a Museum showing in 2006. You can see the full set from this show online at Ten Years of Pride.

London Pride 2004

For the last few years I’ve intended to go to Soho to cover the buzz there after the march, but somehow I’ve always found other things to do. But perhaps I’ll be there tomorrow, if only to meet up with some old friends and have a drink together.

London Pride 2004

Anyway, here is what I wrote back in 2004 and some of the pictures I took on the march from Hyde Park. For some reason I can’t now remember I left the march to go to Paternoster Square close to St Paul’s Cathedral and took a few pictures of the buildings there before returning to the Pride Festival in Trafalgar Square.

London Pride

London Pride 2004

Pride is certainly not what it used to be. It’s lost the edge which came from protest and is now simply a parade, recognised by Ken [Livingstone, Mayor of London] and the police.

London Pride 2004

Good time people out for a good time rather than a crusade for a cause, although there were still a few banners on display against remaining areas of discrimination.

London Pride 2004

This years event also seemed rather small, considerably less than the press estimates before the event, although quite a few more came to the rally in Trafalgar Square.

London Pride 2004
The event stewards took a dim view of people getting in the fountains, but the two women at right entertained the crowd a little, as well as keeping some of us photographers amused. “Oh God”, said one of them, “My mum will see these pictures”. The pose here is right out of a Donald McGill postcard, but I’ll leave the punch line to you..

I don’t know how long they stayed, as the speeches were platitudinous beyond belief. Ken welcomed us to his square in one of the better attempts, and generally received an enthusiastic response, although there were quite a few voices of dissent and more who were taking very little interest.

Here are a few pictures here which I didn’t upload in 2004:

London Pride 2004
London Pride 2004
London Pride 2004

There are also more online on My London Diary, beginning here.

Flickr – Facebook – My London Diary – Hull Photos – Lea Valley – Paris
London’s Industrial Heritage – London Photos

All photographs on this page are copyright © Peter Marshall.
Contact me to buy prints or licence to reproduce.

Soviet photos

I think I should start this post with a health warning. Do not click the link in this post unless you have hours you can afford to spend looking at photographs. You will probably want to rush out and get a bottle of vodka and be glued to your screen forgetting meals, appointments and the rest and come round some time tomorrow with a huge hangover.

It will almost certainly be worse if you can actually make out the Cyrillic characters or actually read Russian, but even without that the pictures are fascinating, with every issue of Советское фото – Soviet Photo magazine – over 400 of them from 1926-1991 now available to read online at Archive.com.

You can read more about the magazine and its history in both Russian and, if you scroll down, in English on the About tab, which also talks about the early controversies in its pages in the late 1920s and early 30s. It was here that the work of Aleksandr Rodchenko was first denounced as plagiarising the work of Western European photographers László Moholy-Nagy and Albert Renger-Patzsch – unfortunately leading the magazine to boycott his work – and later his and similar work politically denounced as formalist; foreign and elitist and not in line with the official party line of Socialist Realism.

Photography developed rather differently in Russia, something that was made clear to me in 1978 when ‘The Russian War 1941-5’, a superb collection of photographs edited by A. J. P. Taylor , Daniela Mrazkova & Vladimir Remes, many of the pictures in which are now well-known.

After the war there was also a disjunct between photography on the two sides of the iron curtain, with relatively little contact between the two. With a few exceptions, the work that we saw came from photographers who had managed to leave the Soviet bloc – though some of those exceptions were notable – such as Czech photographer Josef Sudek (1896-1976), the ‘Poet of Prague’. Things of course began to change with the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.

This is certainly a site to add to your bookmarks, and one that, like vodka, is best taken in small doses.

Of course there is much more available on the Internet Archive, and a recent post looks at their work and at the problems of preserving Internet content. It’s something I have a definite personal interest in, as over 300 articles that I wrote about photography are now, for copyright reasons, only available among the 330 billion web pages, now stored on the ‘Wayback Machine’.