Posts Tagged ‘Man Ray’

Fourteen Years Ago

Tuesday, October 26th, 2021

Here is a piece I wrote about my activities on Friday 26 October 2007. I’ve adjusted the capitalisation, or rather added it – back then My London Diary (or rather ‘my london diary’) didn’t use capitals, a mannerism I now find rather twee. I think it was trying to adopt a very informal tone, something to differentiate it from more traditionally journalistic publications, in keeping with my aims set out when the site began expressed in a statement often repeated on the site:

a record of my day to day wanderings in and around london, camera in hand
and some of my comments which may be related to these – or not
things i’ve found and perhaps things people tell me.
if I really knew what this site was i wouldn’t bother to write it.
it’s london, it’s part of my life,
but mainly pictures, arranged day by day, ordered by month and year
some of my work gets put into nice organised websites
this isn’t meant to be like that

Later My London Diary got rather more organised.

Here’s the piece from 2007 which comes with rather more pictures which you can see starting here:


SIOE fail to attract support – or opposition

Whitehall to Temple, Friday 26 Oct, 2007

Only too often I turn up to photograph advertised events and find that really nothing very much is happening. Usually I’m disappointed, but with the march organised by SIOE (Stop The Islamicisation Of Europe) I’m really rather pleased.

SIOE appears to be two people. There are threes and fours from various other groups, including some from Germany and others from France, making a total of just under 40. My count is 36, the police say 40, making it the only demo where they have ever made a higher figure than me. There are around a dozen still photographers, and just slightly less shooting video, so the media get pretty close to the number of demonstrators.

We’d expected a counter-demo, but it doesn’t happen, though the police stop a couple who seem to be innocent passers-by and hassle them for being vaguely Islamic in appearance at Temple.

So I go to spend a little time in the National Gallery before making my way to Rich Mix, where I’m pleased to see they have got the Paul Trevor show sorted out again, and I can spend 30 minutes looking at some of the best documentary work from the 1970s and 80s – including pictures of several anti-fascist marches I was at – before going to see Brian Griffin and Roof Unit Foundations opening at [space].


And above is one of my four pictures in the Roof Unit Foundations show at [space] in Hackney, taken in Bromley by Bow, on the edge of what later became the Olympic site in 1982. It was an image inspired by Man Ray’s 1920 The Enigma of Isidore Ducasse, itself inspired by a passage in Les Chants de Maldoror, published under his pen name Comte de Lautréamont, ‘Beautiful as the accidental encounter, on a dissecting table, of a sewing machine and an umbrella’. I think my accidental encounter came about in Cooks Road, E15.