Twelve years ago on 17th February 2011 I attended the opening of the show London Street Photography at the Museum of London, and I wrote about the opening here on >Re:PHOTO. Some of the same pictures there are also on My London Diary. The book of the show is long out of print but can be found cheaply secondhand with a little searching.
I was rather surprised to find this particular picture of mine, taken in Whitechapel in 1991 included in the book and show, and also one of the images used to promote the show. Not that I think it’s a bad picture, but to me it was just one of many that could have been chosen. I’ve never really put together a set of what I think are my best street photographs, but here are a few slightly random ones from about the same year.
I actually made two pictures of the shopkeeper standing outside the shop in Whitechapel, and the woman carrying a child walked across as I was talking to him and preparing to take his picture. I think I was just a little slow to react, and would have liked her to be just a fraction to the left, better outlined against the open doorway and for the child she was carrying to be more visible.
Perhaps important to the show was that most of the others from that era and before were in black and white – as most of photography still was. Only one earlier colour picture was featured, although most more recent work was in colour, including all of those taken in the current century.
Also important was that it reflected the changing population of London with a picture that could almost have been taken on the streets of Bangladesh – but so did some others that I took at the time.
Notting Hill Carnival, Notting Hill, Kensington & Chelsea, 1990, 90c8-03-51
I’ve recently re-digitised this and digitised many other colour and black and white images from my early work and made them available on Flickr, though so far I’ve only worked through all of the colour negatives up to the end of February 1991 and the black and white until the end of the following year.
Street scene, Green St, Upton Park, Newham, 1991, 91-31-31
Although almost all of these pictures were taken on the streets of London I don’t think many are really what I would consider ‘street photography’, though this is a category whose elasticity makes it of little use. But for me ‘street photography’ has to be about capturing fleeting moments, not about pictures that are posed or set up. The second picture without the woman walking by isn’t really street photography.
Saturday 27th January 2007 was a rather unusual day for me. Of course one of the joys of working as a photographer is that most days are different, but perhaps this was more varied than most, though I only had three sets of pictures to put on line
No Sweat Protests Burberry Factory Closure – Regent St
I’ve never owned or worn any clothing made by Burberry, but they are very much a traditional British brand, producing and selling clothing that seems rooted in the British countryside and images of farming, hunting shooting and fishing. But I’ve always been a town or city dweller.
Until 2007 their clothing was proudly Made in Britain, and for years had come from a factory in Treorchy in the Rhonda where the factory had started in 1940 and employed large numbers of local skilled workers. The factory was set up when Alfred Pollikoff received funding in 1937 from Lord Nuffield to bring new industries to distressed areas of the country and began production in 1939 producing clothes for all kinds of workers and military uniforms for the Second World War.
The Pollikoff factory was bought by Great Universal Stores in 1948 and was taken over by Burberry, also a part of GUS, in 1989 when they changed its name, although many locally continued to refer to it as Pollikoff’s.
They became one of the largest employers in the Rhonda, at its peak employing around a thousand workers, though by 2006 increased mechanisation had reduced that to around 300. It was a great shock to the workers and the local economy when Burberry in September 2006 announced they were closing the factory at the end of March 2007 and moving production to China.
The Treorchy factory was efficient with high productivity and profitable. But UK labour costs meant that production was more expensive than overseas. According to the GMB union it cost around £11 to produce a polo shirt in Wales, but with cheap labour only around £4 in China. Burberry sold these shirts for around £60 in shops such as that on Regent St.
The Treorchy workers began an huge campaign to keep the factory open, gaining support from many in parliament and such unlikely figures as the owner of Harrods, along with stars including Sir Tom Jones, Michael Sheen, Ioan Gruffudd, Rhys Ifans, Charlotte Church and Ben Elton.
Local MP for Rhonnda, Chris Bryant (brown jacket) with Treorchy workers
A group of workers had come to London to pursue their fight and to demonstrate outside the Bond St and Regent St Burberry stores on January 27th. And a team from ‘No Sweat’, “an activist, campaigning organisation, fighting sweatshop bosses, in solidarity with workers, worldwide”, dressed as removal men arrived to support them, attempting to wrap the shops and workers in brown paper and ship them, second class, to China.
No Sweat’s protest was an amusing act of street theatre and one which helped an otherwise rather vanilla protest gain publicity in the media, always hard for protests to achieve unless they involve celebrities or violent illegal acts. Generally our media are very much on the side of the bosses (like the billionaires who own most of the papers) and the status quo, and the vast majority of protests are simply ignored by them, as “not news”.
Burberry workers destroy a Burberry polo shirt made in Treorchy
Burberry still makes some clothing in Britain (and elsewhere in Europe), and in 2015 enraged some who had fought to keep Treorchy open by announcing plans for an new factory in Leeds, though this was to replace two existing Yorkshire factories.
A number of small businesses were set up after the closure on the factory site, including the Treorchy Sewing Enterprise Ltd, set up by former Burberry employees.
West End Walk – Bond Street, Piccadilly, Leicester Square
I’ve never really thought that ‘street photography’ was a useful definition of an area of photography, and certainly never thought of myself as a street photographer, though the huge majority of my work has been made on the streets.
And while there are some ‘street photographers’ whose work I admire, there does seem to me to be a huge amount of totally vacuous and pointless work that is produced under this label. It too often seems to be an excuse for having nothing to say.
Fortnum and Mason’s clock from 1964 is surely the most hideous in London.
So while the little performance in the tree at the side of the National Gallery may be ‘street photography’ the rest of my pictures on this little walk are more concerned with architectural detail and illustrate the profligacy which was (and is still) enabled by our exploitation of the British Empire. They pictures on this walk also say something about taste and attitudes to women, both in previous eras and of course my own.
Holocaust Memorial Day – Soviet War Memorial & Peace Garden, Lambeth
I was unable to be at the wreath-laying ceremony to mark Holocaust Memorial Day at the Soviet War Memorial in Geraldine Mary Harmsworth Park as I was taking pictures on Regent St. But I did go there later in the day.
The memorial is dedicated to all of the 27 million Soviet civilians and military personnel who died for Allied victory in World War II and off course the Soviet Union played a vital role in the defeat of the Nazis, but the Russian record of persecution of the Jews both before and after the revolution is horrific. The Russian Orthodox Church for centuries led opposition to Jews who were not permitted to go ‘beyond the pale’ into Russia unless they converted. The first recorded pogrom was in Odessa (now in Ukraine) in 1821 and there were widespread pogroms in the Russian empire later in the century which led to many fleeing to Britain and the USA. Tens of thousands of Jews were massacred in the civil war following the 1917 revolution. Antisemitism continues to be rife in Russia after the Soviet era.
Close to the Soviet War Memorial is the Holocaust memorial tree, planted in 2002 by the then Mayor of Southwark where wreaths are also laid at this annual ceremony.
The park surrounds the Imperial War Museum, which houses a moving exhibition on the holocaust, but I didn’t visit it on this day. Instead I went past to the Tibetan Peace Garden in the park, opened in Summer 1999 by the Dalai Lama. It seemed an appropriate place to sit and reflect for a while, which I did, as well as taking some pictures.
You can read more about these events by scrolling down the January 2007 page where there are links to more pictures
After breakfast on Saturday we went for a walk, first making our way alongside the Metro Aerienne to La Rotonde de la Villette, one of my favourite Paris buildings, and then walking a little beside the canal, first to the north and then turning and going south to where there was a street photography show displayed as single images in each of a number of shop windows in the streets around the Rue de Lancry. It was a nice idea, but not really much of a way to display photographs, though we did enjoy the hunt for them. See more about the exhibition and the wedding here on >Re:PHOTO and more photographs in my diary at Street Photography in the 10e.
Of course I was taking pictures, and for a short while became an unofficial wedding photographer, though I turned down an opportunity to join the party as we had other things to do.
The largest photographic event taking place in Paris was not the dealer show Paris Photo, nor even the Mois de la Photographie, though that had the most prestigious shows, but the fringe, the Mois de la Photo-Off. This is a well organised event, with a free booklet listing the many events accepted for it (and there is also a fringe of the fringe with many other photography shows), but also a series of organised tours around the shows in different areas of Paris on each Saturday afternoon in November.
Photographer Loïc Trujillo (left) talks with Neil Atherton, Commissaire General of the Mois de la Photo-OFF, who led the tour, in Galerie Impressions
On November 20th we had a choice of two areas, and picked ‘Beabourg’, going to eight shows and meeting the photographer or gallerist at all but one of them. We spent around 15-20 minutes in each gallery before walking the short distance to the next. At times it was rather taxing on my hazily remembered ‘O’ Level French, and I was pleased to have my interpreter with me. You can read more about the shows on the tour in two posts here, Photo-Off – A Guided Tour – 1 and Photo-Off – A Guided Tour – 2, and again there are more pictures in my diary.
We had to hurry away at the end of the tour to change and meet Linda’s brother and his wife for a dinner in one of Paris’s institutions, Chartier. It has become a must for tourists and it’s best to go early to avoid a long queue.
I spent Sunday morning at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie and you can read about what I saw there in Sunday Worship at the MEP, though there are no illustrations as photography is forbidden there. Linda chose instead to attend the culte at the Temple de l’Oratoire du Louvre, and we met afterwards for lunch, buying some delicious slices of quiches and cakes on the rue St Antoine and sitting and eating them on a bench out of the light rain in the Place des Vosges.
Afterwards we wandered aroung the Marais, visiting several shows open on a Sunday afternoon, including ten Swedish photographers of the collective Tio Fotgrafer and A Few Shows in the 4e, before making our way across the Seine to the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF), to view France 14, the work of 14 younger photographers selected by Raymond Depardon, and then another Metro ride to FIAP Jean Monnet in the 14e, to view a show celebrating 40 years of women’s liberation. And then it was time for dinner and to return to our hotel and rest. There are more photographs from the afternoon in my diary at The Marais and BnF and FIAP.
We had a day before catching our Eurostar back to London on Monday evening for a final walk, rather more relaxed than in the previous days with hardly a visit to a photographic exhibition. You can see the pictures at Monday Wandering and read a little more about the walk at Monday in Paris.
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.
According to some I should be confessing my sins for the criminal behaviour of taking pictures of people in public places like this without first gaining their permission. Of course I don’t see it that way.
On the streets we have no “reasonable expectation of privacy” and while I think we should all – whether taking photographs or not – generally try not to behave in ways that give others reasonable call for upset, making a photograph does not usually fall into that category. Of course there are some photographers who have adopted a very aggressive approach which I feel is questionable, and there are offences such as stalking and ‘up-skirting’, but in general photographing people in public is not a criminal offence, even if those being photographed may not like it. And of course there is sometimes a strong public interest in photographing people who make it clear that they do not want to be photographed.
Mostly those I’ve photographed, at least in recent years, have been involved in protests, and making a protest implies a clear statement that you wish your actions to be recorded and there is also a clear public interest in doing so. But there is also a public interest in the recording and making statements about everyday life, the ordinary behaviour of people often unaware they are being photographed. So while I may occasionally have upset people by taking their pictures, and I may apologise that they feel upset, I’m not apologising for taking pictures or for my actions, but that I’m sorry that they think that way.
This doesn’t mean that I never ask people if I may take their picture. There are times and places where I do, usually when I need to work closely with them and take more than a single image, but more often to do so would mean missing the moment and failing to express what I saw as important to say.
I had to sort through my own ideas on this back around 1990 when I worked on a transport project taking pictures of people on buses. I don’t think there is a single picture I took for that where I asked for permission, and few that I could have made had I done so. Some were clearly aware that I was taking their picture, but most were not.
Only one person actually objected. He was a man sitting on a seat in a bus dressed in shorts with a snake around his bare upper body. I didn’t get a chance to reply to him, as two elderly women sitting to one side immediately butted in, telling him clearly that if he travelled on buses dressed like that he should expect to be photographed. I think his real objection was that I was not paying him – this was his working outfit, and he was on his way to pose with tourists in Covent Garden for a fee.
These thoughts were aroused by an article on PetaPixel, a response by Kansas City photographer Brandon Ballweg to an opinion piece published in the New York Daily News by writer Jean Son titled “When your photograph harms me: New York should look to curb unconsensual photography of women“. In Street Photography Is Not a Crime. Let’s Keep it That Way Ballweg describes her premise that any photographing of women in public places constitutes “gender-based violence“, as “hyperbolic and irresponsible” and goes on to comment on her behaviour and and arguments, as well as what seems to him (and me) her totally inconsistent later claim that “Garry Winogrand is one of my fave artists btw“. Somehow it was fine to photograph women (and men) on the street without their consent in the 1950s, 1960s, 70s and 80s as he so consistently did but now she considers it an offence.
Ballweg ends his piece – worth reading and illustrated by a number of Winogrand images – with a suggestion of a “rational, mature, adult way of dealing with a situation of you’ve been photographed” and don’t like it and goes on to suggest that if having someone take your picture causes you “such distress that you lobby to convene a task force to ban it” then it may be due to “some underlying personal issues that you need to work through and confront as an individual” rather than a problem with photography.
It’s perhaps a little harsh a statement, but reflects Son’s failure to distinguish between actual gender-based violence and the taking of photographs. It’s a vital line to draw if not always clear exactly where it lies, and one which the US Legal system has clearly failed to do in some cases as Son rightly points out.
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’ve long been a fan of Daido Moriyama, and also of Photo District News (PDN), which was required reading back when I was paid to write about photography on the web for a US-owned web company, and whose web site remains on my list of sites to visit when I have a spare moment. The magazine is still available in print – and you can also subscribe for a digital edition, but you can sign up for free to read the articles on the web site, which include Daido Moriyama’s Street Photography Advice Sounds Sexy (and It Works) which I found a few days ago thanks to a shorter post on PDNPulse.
One of the thicker blocks on my overloaded bookshelves is Provoke: Between Protest and Performance, published in 2016 and I think my ‘Book of the Year’ (and now selling used on Amazon for four times what I paid for it.)
Eikoh Hosoe takes a picture at Alcatraz in Bielsko-Biala, Poland, 2005
Moriyama in 1961 became assistant to Eikoh Hosoe who I was privileged to meet in Poland in 2005. In 1968 and 1969, together with Takuma Nakahira, Takahiko Okada, Yutaka Takanashi, and Kôji Taki he produced the three issues of the magazine ‘Provoke’ around which the book is based. Since then he has produced so much more – and you can see just a little on his web site.
The article on PDN is an excerpt fromhis latest book, Daido Moriyama: How I Take Photographs, written by Moriyama and Takeshi Nakamoto. It stresses the need to be open to experiences and to really look at things and react to them. Like him I’m a strong believer in the importance of “desire”.
Thanks to PetaPixel for bringing to my attention the video 1838-2019: Street Photography – A Photo For Every Year with 182 photos — one photo for every year between 1838 when Daguerre set up his camera overlooking the Boulevard du Temple and 2019 with activists hassling an MP outside Parliament in London.
It’s a curiously hypnotic experience, with each photo appearing for around 6 seconds, with a musical soundtrack that reflects the changing decades, and a rather strange selection of images by Guy Jones, taken on streets around the world, though majoring on the USA. I found it rather annoying but I couldn’t stop watching, though I did turn the volume right down.
Almost all of the pictures certainly are taken on streets and show people, but it rather reflects the lack of any real integrity in the term ‘street photography‘. And while the pictures do reflect the changes in technology over the years, any real historical oversight is entirely prejudiced by every picture from the 20th and 21st century being presented as colour – which for most means a recently colorized version of an original black and white picture. Some colours were rather less than believable. This is faux history in the making.
You’ll probably recognise a few of the pictures, and some of the photographers, but mixed in with these are some rather anonymous postcard views, press images and amateur holiday snaps, which don’t always seem particularly appropriate to represent the year in which they are taken. It’s in a way a very uninformative video; often I found myself wanting to know more about why a particular picture was taken and what it it shows. And for those taken in more recent times I did wonder whether Jones has permission to use the images from the copyright holders. I hope so, though I saw no closing credits to indicate this.
