London Riots – links
Now that they’re over and done with* I was considering writing a post on what it was like covering the London Riots. The riots, which some say were inevitable and others say came out of the blue, saw most of the press photographers across London and the other cities involved doing their best to take pictures under some rather hideous and trying conditions at great personal risk.
Rather than my inevitable waffling on the subject I’ve decided to push through a few links to the work of three others whose work does a much better job of showing what went on and shot much better work than I.
AFP’s Leon Neal (on Twitter as @tabascokid)
AP’s Lewis Whyld (on Twitter as @LewisWhyld)
Getty’s Dan Kitwood (on Twitter as @dkitwood)
And also The Boston Globe’s two galleries on the subject, encompassing the work of several other agency photographers.
*For now…?
A few excellent links
As I’m off out to run around running chores, this seems like an easier way to publish a few links* than trying to retweet them all**.
With the industry still in flux, Chip Litherland has compiled a blog post on the 100 things we all still love about photojournalism.
Over at PDN Eamonn McCabe discusses his selection of pictures to represent the last decade.
Student protests:
One blog post by Leon Neal about covering last weeks student protest for AFP.
And another by Andrew Winning on the same protest, but working for Reuters.
And last, but not least, more press related copyright shenanigans with some getting their fingers burnt for taking what isn’t theirs:
Enjoy!
*I have a bad habit of clicking on links, leaving the tab open and reading them when I have a free second. I don’t have many free seconds so they sometimes build up and I don’t always retweet them.
**Think of this as a quick Readers Digest type post, but without obligation to subscribe to a lot of books, some with stories in you’ll never read. However, the downside of this is that when people visit, you won’t be able to give off the impression that you’re well read by allowing them to take in the rows of faux leather bound volumes adorning the shelves either side of your faux granite fireplace.***
*** This is non-functioning and contains one of those 80s electric fires with those spinny bits that made it looking like it had some sort of ‘flames’; though we all know you’re not fooling anyone and when we leave we all take the Michael when you close the door.
On being non-exclusive
Wednesday saw the second of two rather large student demonstrations in London. The aim of both was to allow students to protest against cuts to the educational system and what is in essence a tripling of tuition fees.
Masked protesters attack the front of a police van stuck in the middle Whitehall during a demonstration on the tripling of university tuition fees.
In both cases the protests turned violent, with a minority of masked* types deciding to vandalize anything (nailed down or otherwise**). Obviously, one would think that this type of event has the potential to make for good photographic opportunities. The truth is, mostly…
Protesters smash the windows on a branch of the Royal Bank of Scotland during demonstrations taking place in London during the G20 protests. © Simon Pollock/www.gtvone.com
Much like the G20 protests in April of last year at any one time there are only a few things going on. This time the majority of the focus was on a police van abandoned and marooned amid several thousand protesters, at the protest before everything was focussed on the front of Tory HQ and during the G20 protests we had the lone branch of RBS which was broken into and up. All ended up being the main illustrative images of each demonstration.
In some ways this should make things easy, you watch where the crowd goes and head that way, and to some extent it is. All three occasions saw anything of any importance shrouded by photographers, all jostling for position, all looking for a decisive moment. And with the exception of G20/RBS incident, I was one of them.
Protesters attack a window in the reception of Conservative Party headquarters at 30 Millbank during a student demonstration over the raising of university tuition fees.
At the G20 protests, when I was actually working for myself to bolster my portfolio for an approach to an agency, I decided to keep away from the bank and concentrate on the people behind. Sadly that’s not the case when you have someone on the phone asking for pictures of the van*** and are acutely aware that you need to file the pictures ASAP†.
The problem with having one main thing happening within a crowd at any one time is that everyone with a camera will also gravitate to that place and it’s not just the other photographers there to make a buck and put food on the table. Because these events are scheduled, coordinated and published in advance scores of people with every kind of camera will be present, competing with everyone else to see what’s going on at the front of the huddle.
In the middle of a protest in London over the tripling of tuition fees photographers raise their cameras to capture the moment a demonstrator climbs the front of a police van stranded on Whitehall.
It’s a discussion that seems to crop up time and time again, when I’m around other photographers, and it’s probably the hardest part about shooting a protest. When you look around you see everything from the latest Canon or Nikon model to ancient 35mm types and even the odd medium format Hassleblad†† or Mamiya. So much so that after watching the news reports friends ask, “Aren’t you tired of this yet?“, “But surely there were hundreds of other photographers there? So what’s the point?“
To the former the reply is always no, but to the second there’s always the a counter argument. Yes, there are multitudes of people present at these things, toting an eclectic mix of cameras, but not all are going to do much with their images. Yes you get the pack who are filing pictures all over the place (foreign and domestic), but they seem to make up the minority.
Hold your camera in the air if you like photography!
The rest are made up of, bystanders with cameras, hobbiests†††, who want something interesting to throw up on flickr and even protesters with cameras (especially at the last two student protests, student papers need pictures too). Sometimes they (especially those of the non filing variety) may get in the way (hey, we all manage to get stuck in front of someone else’s lens from time to time) and sometimes they may be rude (again 99% of the time the non filing types), but sod it, they have a right to be there as well, regardless of the inevitable police cordon it’s a public place and a little bit of a word (or sometimes lots of loud words) usually gets the trick done.
Photographers clamber to take pictures of the TSG's new fetching blue baseball caps.
Even though you know you’re creating good wholesome imagesª you know that every picture you take is also captured simultaneously by several cameras at once, you just have to hope that the shutter firing next to you belongs to someone who isn’t going to be trying to file to somewhere. Anyway, I think the point of this post (yes, there’s supposed be a point… honestly!) is, that as a photographer, just as it is with the protesters, it’s very hard not to get caught up in the moment and swarm to the one thing you see going on. But maybe that’s something we should avoid more? OK, so get a few pictures of the thing the picture monkeyªª on the other end of the phone wants, but after that bugger off and look for something else away from the swarm. For example, what Telegraph photographer Eddie Mulholland did (via @kate_day – who is well worth following on Twitter), it just shows, I should look back to what I did on April 1st 2009 and remember…
"Sentries have come in from the hills, Mr. Bromhead, sir. They report Zulus, I mean, cameras to the south west. Thousands of them"
Many thanks to Simon Pollock (aka @gtvone) for allowing me to use his image of the G20 Royal Bank of Scotland incident. His blog/site in all it’s glory can be found at http://www.gtvone.com go, click links.
The Inevitable extra bits…
*Wearing G20 ‘anarchist’ style face coverings is now de rigueur amongst students. I expect to turn up to my next lecture and see half the class rendered unrecognisable after festooning the lower half of their faces with shemaghs, scarves and rags.
** – Oddly, I actually asked one of the protesters why he threw a missile that fell short of the police line and hit another demonstrator on the head, the answer was, “I dunno, I’m not sure.” Before he grinned stupidly and wandered off into the crowd.
*** – And mainly the bits without swearwords graffitied on the sides… The Daily Mail will obviously not be printing “FUCK POLICE” within it’s pages… doesn’t go down well with the readership. Sadly, students have potty mouths and just about everything involved a rude word of some description…
† – I didn’t… Which became a problem.
†† – There was someone at the G20 demonstration with a Hassleblad and light meter doing portraits of the protesters.
††† - Sometimes of the type who want to try and get something published… just for a credit, but that’s a discussion for another day.
ª – Like wholemeal bread and rather good for you, but actually needed to pay for the wholesome bread you need to buy to fuel your body to make wholesome images… it’s the circle of life don’t ya’ know!
ªª – I quote: “If you don’t get a pix (sic) of that van all graffiti’d up I will never speak to you again” Sorry bud, I know you don’t like being tied to a desk in the warm when it’s bloody freezing outside!
This post was written during two brief periods of procrastination and as such it’s only fair I bung in some music, today from the absolutely brilliant OK Go:
Just some links
Since I’ve been reading interesting posts up from various sources this week I thought I’d share the love!
Series of articles from the Guardian written by reporter Gaith Abdul-Ahad ‘embedded’ with the Taliban in Afghanistan:
Series of images – Taliban fighters in Baghlan, Afghanistan
Part one – The Taliban troop with an east London cab driver in its ranks
Part two – Five days inside a Taliban jail
Part three – Talking to the Taliban about life after occupation
A follow up blog post by David Campbell over on his blog:
Thinking Images V.6 Gaith Abdul-Ahad’s Taliban photographs
And finally, an opinion piece by Patrick Cockburn of the Independent:
Embedded journalism: A distorted view of war
The above don’t necessarily reflect any point of view I may have, I just found them all an interesting read!
Shooting without manifesto
Yup, two posts in quick succession, this would be a bit of procrastination…
Had a bit of a random ‘early o’clock’ wander along Oxford Street the other day. Kind of a quick exploration of street photography. something I guess I rarely do, I’ve no problem with confrontational situations, my past and present point to that. But there’s something feels slightly wrong and intrusive about poking my camera into the face of someone that isn’t part of a story; I think it shows when you look at how close I actually got to my subjects. Beyond that, it was still fun (as all photography is bound to be).
The following images are a selection from the results.
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- Up from the depths
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- Ready for the rush
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- Look
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- Who’s next?
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- Dummies get intimate
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- Wrapped up warm inside
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- Reading in the cold
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- The man says come inside…
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- Whatcha looking at?
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- Half open, half closed
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- This cigarette tastes like lemon…
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- Loo eft
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- Chilly out
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- London doesn’t like Bruce Gilden
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- Or does it…
Still have a post on the student protests to publish, but you’ll have to wait for that one…
Vietnam: Old Glory, Young Blood
Last year I can remember doing a module that involved taking look at magazine layouts. Somehow I chanced across a blog called ‘things to look at‘. As a fan of all things visual* I obviously spent quite a bit of time perusing the posts they have on offer.
Wandering through the blog like a small child in a toy shop (as one does) I found exactly the type of thing I was looking for, some scans of Don McCullin’s classic Sunday Times article, Vietnam: Old Glory, Young Blood. Originally published back in 1968 the picture spread features some of the work that have since become iconic images (the scans are also big enough to read the accompanying text which is a massive plus).
Vietnam: Old Glory, Young Blood
Why not go and check it out, maybe the people over at ‘things to look at’ will start to post again? They can also be found on Twitter as @Things2lookat
Anyway, best get back to my essay… damn thing won’t write itself.**
*Obviously there are exceptions to this rule… as there are to all rules, like the one about never running next to a swimming pool and the other one, that you should never, on any occasion, without exception, bomb in the pool… otherwise they send in the tigers…
**Apparently this is normal, no matter how much you stare at the screen they seem to have a habit of waiting till you start to type… which, lets face it, is just plain rude.
f2.8 and away!
A while ago (before I moved to civilisation) I received a question on the unknownsnapper hotline*. Could I pop to London over the weekend and fill in for another photographer at a shoot at Crystal Palace? Remembering my childhood fondness for the plastic dinosaurs situated there I instantly said yes.
Imagine my horror, when I discovered that the behemoth esque (and, if we’re being truthful, not very realistic) pretend monsters of my youth would not feature in the pictures I was required to take.** Instead I would be concentrating on the Aviva London Grand Prix athletics event. A totally new area of photography to explore (which is always a good thing).
I was required to shoot for three days, capturing images of competing athletes, some of the sponsor’s branding and some of their staff at work around the stadium. My initial worry was that I really don’t have the equipment (having shot major sport events in the past using kit that was definitely not up to the job), but the photographer I would be subbing for assured me that wouldn’t be a problem as he would be able to lend me some of the bits and bobs I needed.
After receiving accreditation (standard god awful image of me on a bit of plastic with a dangly cord), a quick brief from the client and doing our best to ignore the abysmal British August weather*** we were off.
After about an hour of shooting the other photographer needed to leave, with him he took my dead lens (RIP) and my lowest spec body, leaving me with a 1D MkIII in its place.
Looking back through the images I took on the first day, I can instantly see that something was missing. The majority of sporting images, be it cycling, football, formula 1, or in this case athletics have a certain form to them. By form I mean that there is a recognisable pattern to them, the viewer can look at them and instantly know “this is X” as they associate the shapes or action with that sport. The pictures I was producing lacked that form.
Luckily, the next morning, I had the chance to speak to the photographer I was working for (he’d managed to peruse some of the images I’d taken on the Friday). His advice was to push the lenses to their maximum aperture and compose closer shots of the athletes, as soon as he said that I could see exactly what he meant. I’d been working with a smaller f-stop and alternating between Av (aperture priority – a vice of mine) and manual; a verbal cuff around the ear ensured that I would leave Av behind and stick with manual.
Back at the track I started to do what I was told‡ and things began to click into place with the result that I was very happy with the resulting photographs; yet another learning experience!
*The unknownsnapper hotline® is a 1980s ‘mobile’ phone painted red and situated in the passenger side footwell of my Ford Capri (Ghia). If I ever offer you a lift, I’m afraid you’re sitting in the back – them’s the rules! Anyway, if you sat too close there’s a 90% chance you would lose your ability to procreate.
**It wasn’t even anything to do with the zoo that may or may not still be located there, I don’t even remember seeing the huge concrete monstrosity that apparently fooled the captive mountain goats there into believing they were on a real mountain – mountain goats are apparently not noted for their IQ, even as a 5 year old I can remember knowing it was definitely not a natural construct…
***In a talk with a farming friend recently I was informed that things had been that dry recently that everyone was praying for rain. They must have hired a whole tribe of rain dancers, because it was raining cats and dogs in that stadium – N.B. Note to self, must remember to bill farming friend for the 20-40mm lens that got killed during the downpour.
‡Say it with me, “Whoooo’s a good little photographer?” (to be accompanied by condescending pat on head).
