21 years ago on 22 Jan 2000 I photographed a March against police racism organised by the Movement For Justice in Wood Green, and it is one of the earlier protests that I featured on my web site My London Diary.
It wasn’t of course the first protest that I had photographed, which had been around 25 years earlier, and through the 1990s I had increasingly begun to attend and photograph various political events, although the bulk of my work was still in other areas.
My London Diary didn’t exist in January 2000, but when I set up the site a year or two later I scanned some of my 8×10″ file prints from 1999 and 2000 to put some content on the site from the start.
At the time I was still working mainly in black and white and sending prints to the library that handled my work; they also worked with colour transparencies, but I had given up taking these 15 years earlier and moved to colour negative. The library then couldn’t handle digital files, and also my flatbed scanner was only black and white. At the start there was little or no colour work on My London Diary, though things soon changed as I first used a consumer digital camera as a personal notebook, then moved to working with a Nikon DSLR.
The earliest protest to be featured on My London Diary was from Brixton in February 1999, and over a similar issue, a National Civil Rights march calling for the release of Winston Silcott. So many years later things perhaps have changed very little – just the names, as the recent death of Mohamud Mohammed Hassan shows.
It wasn’t in 2000 easy to find out when and where protests other than the big national events organised by groups such as CND and the anti-war protests were taking place, but in June 1999 Indymedia had been founded around the global justice anticapitalist protest Carnival Against Capital and around this time many groups involved in protests were beginning to use the web to communicate through e-mail and web sites.
From around 2000 I began to cover many more protests, partly because I left full-time teaching and could attend more, but also because it became easier to find out about them. It was some time later that I began to put my pictures from protests on Indymedia, as a way of sharing my work with those I had photographed. I was also sending them to photo agencies in order to finance the work, as well as working as a writer on photography. I began My London Diary as a way to get my work to a wider audience, and hoped it would generate enough direct sales to at least cover the costs involved.
It has managed to do that and has also provided a great deal of feedback over the years, but hasn’t been a huge financial success.