The Dead Zone

I heard the siren and reached for my wallet. I was surprised they'd taken so long: I'd been walking along the pavement by the Athletes' Village construction site (above) with a camera round my neck for almost ten minutes. By the time the four police officers emerged from their vehicle I had a smile on my face and a press card in my hand. They were very polite, looked at the card, took my name, and drove off.

There are still four months to go before the Olympics come to town, but the area that stretches from the edges of newly fashionable Hackney Wick across to the rebranded Stratford City is already sterile.

It will be a long time before autonomous human activity is possible here. For now, the general public figure only as a security issue, or customers. It's rather like a giant airport, without the planes. Everywhere there are barriers, fences, and security guards in high-vis jackets. When the circus finally comes to town it will get worse. Drones, battleships and ground-to-air missiles have been promised.

From the Greenway, the well-used public footpath that runs along its southern edge, the out-of-bounds Olympic Park is underwhelming. Through wire mesh screens, even the supposedly iconic ArcelorMittal Orbit (below), by the usually wonderful Anish Kapoor, looks a mess, the sculpture's name itself a reminder of the dead hand of corporate capital that underpins the whole enterprise.

Sprawling around the north-east of the park the concrete towers of the 'Village', now jointly owned by the Qatari royal family and private UK investment company Delancey, are nearing completion. Overlooking the site from Stratford High Street is a 43 storey tower draped in huge banners advertising construction company Ardmore and Genesis Housing Association. And the self-styled 'Gateway to the Games' is Westfield Stratford City, the largest shopping centre in Europe.

If I were an athlete, focussed single-mindedly on the culmination of four years hard work, none of this would matter. But I'm not. I don't like starring on someone else's CCTV screen. I don't like being treated like a profit centre on legs. And I hate airports. There must be a better way to run a sports tournament.

More photos here

Something is Happening Here

Anyone taking a stroll around the area to the east of London's Old Street roundabout for the first time might well start feeling like Bob Dylan's Mr Jones: you know that something is happening here, but you don't know what it is.

From high up on gable ends, right down to pavement level, sprayed onto walls, doors, shutters – flat surfaces of any kind – a painted army of the grotesque and the bizarre marches across the built environment. The buildings themselves are a contrasting mix of Victorian dereliction and the smartly modern. In between crumbling onetime industrial premises, recently converted factories and warehouses now host offices and apartments whose occupants are served by a growing number of minimalist galleries, fashionable bars, and Macbook-infested coffee shops.

The demographic is mostly young – twenty to thirtysomething – techy, tapered jeans and T shirts, some strange haircuts. The place is buzzing. Builders' cranes break up the skyline. The massive new concrete viaduct of the East London Line sweeps over road junctions and vacant lots. It doesn't feel like the recession has reached these parts, despite its proximity to Threadneedle Street.

But what's driving all this is not visible from the street. Hidden away in the new workspaces are between 300 and 600 tech 'start-ups' (estimates vary), some already pulling in big money, others hoping to justify the faith of their venture capital investors. People call this 'Silicon Roundabout'. The government prefers 'Tech City', but either way it's clearly thriving - the closest thing we've got to an economic success story.



Of course, economic crisis and government-induced austerity are not far away. Rough sleepers and rougher drinkers still hang out in the subways leading out of Old Street tube (it has free public toilets, an important facility for the homeless); at lunchtime, beggars sit on the ground by sandwich bars and cash machines. Not everyone is an IT entrepreneur: there are car washers and security guards, bar workers and shop assistants - and the occasional older resident or passer-by who may have lived there all their lives, but look about them as though they have strayed inadvertently onto another planet.

Why here? Immediately to the south, the steel and glass towers along Bishopsgate appear to be creeping relentlessly northwards; to the east, Stratford City is being sterilised in preparation for the Olympics. But for the moment rents are relatively cheap, and this, together with what Wired has described as 'a critical mass of available programming talent, and just enough outside investment', has combined to produce a place that actually makes stuff.

This is what unplanned regeneration looks like. It's not consumption-led, like Westfield's mega-mall in Stratford, or reliant on ever-inflating property prices, like the speculative scorched earth schemes favoured elsewhere in the capital (Hammersmith & Fulham's proposals for Earls Court, for instance). It's organic, a by-product of a new industrial revolution. There are still boarded-up buildings, makeshift conversions, and scrappy rubble-strewn corners, but it's a lot more interesting than the monolithic conceits of top-down re-development. And even if Mr Jones doesn't know exactly what it is, it's definitely not Desolation Row.

More photos here.

Consultation, Hammersmith & Fulham Style

Residents of West Kensington and Gibbs Green Estates were last night turned away from a consultation meeting called to discuss proposals to sell their estates to a private developer and demolish them. Hammersmith and Fulham council officers refused to address the residents as a group, insisting they queue outside a small side room to be seen individually.

The council wants to knock down 760 homes to make way for a grand Earls Court redevelopment scheme. The Residents' Associations are totally opposed, and plan to use forthcoming legislation to take over the estates and run them as a resident-controlled mutual.

The meeting – held at a local Holiday Inn - appeared to be an attempt at divide and rule tactics, but many more residents turned up than could be dealt with one at a time. A letter of objection was handed over, and most left without speaking to anyone other than their neighbours.

More information is available on Dave Hill's London Blog.

The Next Big Thing?

Since photo-blogging website Lightbox launched in June 2011, two million users have downloaded its Android mobile phone app.

According to co-founder and CEO Thai Tran (above), the site was originally conceived as a photography bolt-on to Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms. It soon evolved into something rather more ambitious when it became clear that many photographers – both amateur and professional - were using it as a stand-alone gallery for their work. Version two, launched in December, added social features enabling following and sharing, and very quickly established its own stand-alone community.

As well as direct access to the Lightbox website, the Android app contains an optional integrated QuickSnap camera. Like the popular Instagram and Hipstamatic apps for the iPhone, it offers in-phone image editing tools, but allows a choice of less stylised image outputs than the iOS programmes.

Tran isn't worrying about income streams – both access to the website and the app download are free. Twitter took three years to turn a profit, and Facebook took five, by which time it had 300 million users worldwide. For now, and for the next eighteen months, the priority for him and his eight-strong team is building the Lightbox user community, not revenue.

Will it be the next 'big thing'? The venture capital funded company is unusual in being so directly focussed on photography, but it is just one of several hundred tech start-ups now operating out of what has been dubbed 'Silicon Roundabout', the run-down but rapidly gentrifying commercial district around the Old Street roundabout, just north of the City of London. The government is hoping the area will become a London version of California's Silicon Valley, birthplace of some of the biggest businesses on the planet, and set up its Tech City initiative in 2010 to help make this happen.

Tech City has its critics, but IT entrepreneurs are widely seen as crucial in rebalancing the UK economy away from its over-reliance on the financial sector. Whether this happens, and whether Lightbox makes it up there with the global US brands, we'll have to wait and see. In the meantime, take a look at the Lightbox website. There's a surprising amount of interesting stuff on show.

More pictures of Silicon Roundabout are here.

All Work and No Pay

It's good to see Tesco franticly back-tracking in response to protests over its participation in the government's welfare-to-work programme. The campaign against workfare has widespread support and other high street retailers, fearing similar negative publicity, are under pressure to follow suit. Although the issue hit the headlines this week, it's been going on for years – ever since the previous Labour administration introduced Mandatory Work Related Activity as part of its New Deal. That's what's going on in the WH Smith store pictured below.

According to the Fair Pay Network, the average hourly rate for supermarket workers is £6.83, whilst the 'living wage' outside London is £7.20, and in London, £8.30. Low pay is bad enough. No pay is a step too far.

Austerity Blues #2

More on the ‘north-south divide’, with The Guardian reporting that “A stark north-south divide is laid bare by a study …. which shows towns and cities in the Midlands and the north are being hardest hit by the high street downturn.”

The problem was all too visible on a recent visit to Doncaster town centre (above) - shop vacancy rates in some northern towns are as high as 30%. But the ‘south’ is not a homogenous sea of prosperity and plenty. In the poorer districts of London (below) many shops stand empty – the averaged-out figures look a lot better than the shuttered-up shop fronts they conceal.

Are these pictures of poverty? Or austerity? They’re certainly part of the economic context, but not enough, on their own, to explain either. As I wrote recently, these are issues that cannot be captured in single frames.

Austerity Blues #1

Having written about the problems of picturing poverty in 21st Century Austerity Britain last week, I’m going to stick my neck out and attempt to do just that. It’s not going to be done with a single picture, or even a single posting on these pages. This is just a first instalment.

I’ll start by trying to confuse the ‘north-south divide’ issue even further: the pictures above and below were taken at a car boot sale near my home in London. Definitely south. More pictures here.

Picturing Poverty

The Guardian newspaper recently illustrated a story on the ‘north-south divide’ with a picture of a child running down a Manchester back alley in the rain. The caption read “A child playing in Manchester. A charity says 1.6 million UK children live in poverty”. The alley does look typically northern, but nothing in the picture suggests deprivation, other than an echo, for photo buffs with a long memory, of a Bert Hardy photo of the Gorbals taken in 1948.

There is nothing wrong with the Guardian photo itself, just with how it has been used. The iconography of poverty too often makes use of stereotypes, and in this case the caption relies on ‘up north and wet’ to convey the intended meaning.

What does poverty look like when the sun is shining? According to the latest Indices of Multiple Deprivation, Jaywick Sands (below), close to the Essex resort of Clacton-on-Sea, is the most deprived ward in the UK. But despite the boarded-up shops and broken pavements, under a blue August sky, it doesn’t really look the part.

With some exceptions, it is difficult for a single image to capture either the experience, or the causes, of poverty in a developed western economy. We don’t have tin-roofed shanty towns (although Brooklands Estate in Jaywick, originally built as a low-cost beach-side holiday resort, comes close). Even the poorest child has shoes. The statistics tell us that a low income tends to result in obesity rather than emaciation.

Decaying infrastructure, as in Jaywick, signifies something is wrong, but not how it impacts on people’s lives, or how it got that way. No-one is suggesting that those living north of Watford Gap are particularly feckless. The poverty of the ‘north-south divide’ is clearly systemic, its causes macro-economic and political, usually complex, and often longstanding. Many parts of northern England have never recovered from the rapid de-industrialisation of the 1980s. The tens of thousands of jobs lost in coal and steel have not been replaced. How do you show something that isn’t there?

The exceptions – instances where a single photograph does unambiguously capture something of the feel of poverty – are also problematic. Obvious examples are the images of rough sleepers used in fund-raising publicity by charities for the homeless. Family breakdown, mental illness and drug misuse are the most common reasons people end up on the street. But the focus on individual stories, however tragic, which such images encourage, diverts attention away from the failures, also systemic, that underlie them: inadequate care homes, mental health facilities and housing provision.

The current economic crisis is often compared to the Great Depression of the 1930s. In the UK, that era is still remembered through the faded black and white images of the Jarrow Crusade, flat-capped dole queues, and downcast men standing idle on street corners. Poverty doesn’t look like that any more. Colour makes a big difference. The girl in the Guardian photograph is wearing a bright red coat. It looks new. In black and white it would have shown up as a miserable dark blob.

More importantly, the communities that grew up around the now closed pits, steelworks and other heavy industrial sites have largely fragmented. The ethos of solidarity that they embodied, and that underpinned the birth of the Welfare State, has been displaced by the individualism of the neo-liberal years. Although the causes of poverty and unemployment remain systemic, they are no longer experienced collectively. How can you convey the bigger picture with photographs of individuals? It can be done, but it needs more than one picture, the right words, and some history.

In the USA, the Depression years were famously documented in depth by the photographers of the Farm Securities Administration. The body of work they produced, of derelict farms, dust-blown fields, bankrupt share-cropper families, soup kitchens and the rest, managed to show that bigger picture, in a way that gave a context to photographs of individuals. It is impossible to look at Dorothea Lange’s well-known ‘Migrant Mother’ photograph, for instance, without having in the back of one’s mind images, by Walker Evans and others, of the destitution she was fleeing.

All that is a long way from sun-blessed Essex. Not only is the experience of poverty in 21st century Britain more fragmented, it is also mitigated by the existence of the Welfare State, whatever its inadequacies. In Jaywick a high proportion of residents are dependent on state benefits or pensions, but they are not typical. Most people whose income falls below the poverty threshold in the UK are in work. The National Minimum Wage is currently £6.08 an hour for those aged 21 and over; the minimum for apprentices is £2.60; the National Living Wage (outside London) is £7.60. None of these rates are affected by the weather. People ‘up north’ aren’t poor because it rains a lot. And down south, even if it looks less gritty, poverty doesn’t go away when the sun shines. It’s a complicated story, and newspapers need to find better ways of telling it.



This article first appeared in the January 2012 issue of the British Journal of Photography.

Beer, Sandwiches & Hypocrisy

Earlier this week a group of MPs, plus assorted followers on the right of the Conservative Party, celebrated the launch of the Trade Union Reform Campaign (TURC) with a ‘Beer and Sandwiches’ reception at the House of Commons. Top of the bill was Eric Pickles, Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government (pictured below); also in attendance was former Defence Secretary Liam Fox.

It’s hard to know how seriously to take the campaign, despite its distinguished proponents – or even how seriously it takes itself. Both the ironic beer (bottled Spitfire) and sandwiches were plentiful. The speeches were brief and addressed to a room full of the already converted. The only journalist was from the Morning Star.

The TURC wants to bring an end to what it calls “taxpayer funded trade union activity”, with one of its key demands that unions should pay commercial rents for the use of public buildings. This, surprisingly, it does not apply to its own anti-union activity, making free use of the Commons’ oak-panelled (publicly owned) Jubilee Room, with not a raised eyebrow in sight.

This is All Copyrighted

The Intellectual Property Office (IPO) has issued a Call for Evidence as part of its follow-up to the Hargreaves Review on copyright. The submission deadline is 10 February.

It’s worth reading Stop43’s assessment of the proposals (mostly positive, but with some strong reservations) before responding. A more scabrous account can be found in The Register.

The big idea, a ‘Digital Copyright Exchange’ could be a good one, but not if it legalises the commercial use of Orphan Works or enforces an Extended Collective Licensing arrangement with no opt-out. The first is a thieves’ charter; the second, a state-sponsored seizure of creators’ intellectual property.

If you are a photographer and you want control over who uses your work, and how much they pay to do so, you should seriously consider making a submission.

If you’re wondering about the status of the wall art in the photo above – I’ve got no idea either, although I do know that the hoarding on which it is painted is not the property of the person or persons who painted it.

The Best Things In Life Are Free

Street pictures offer many possibilities, providing background for a story, as well as opportunities for comment, irony or humour. Like other photographs, taken out of context, they can also be quite ambiguous. I suspect this one, taken last week in Oxford Street during the post-Christmas sales, may be read quite differently by different viewers. For me, it expresses everything I feel about shopping. And tax evasion. More pictures here.

The End of History?

In 30 years as a freelance photojournalist I have never hidden behind a hedge with a long lens, or importuned anyone on a doorstep. I have no interest in celebrities. Nevertheless, some of the suggestions being bandied about inside and outside the Leveson phone-hacking inquiry, if implemented, could stop me in my tracks.

Much of my time is spent documenting the society I live in. To do that I often photograph in the street and other public places, and my focus is almost always on people. A privacy law that required me to ask for permission from anyone who enters my frame would make that impossible.

In France. which already has legislation that includes a right to privacy, even when ‘in public’, street photography is still permitted – but publish and you may well be damned. In recent years a couple of court rulings have gone in favour of the photographer’s right to freedom of expression, but earlier ones have gone the other way – prioritising the subject’s ‘image rights’. Initiating legal action depends on the resources of the litigant; the outcome on the whim of a judge. Who wants to make that calculation before pressing the shutter release?

Were similar privacy legislation to be introduced here, many aspects of the social history of this country would no longer be legitimate subjects for the camera. An important element of the free public discourse that is an essential feature of an open society would be lost, and the damage would be felt by everyone – from professional photojournalists, to kids posting their smartphone snaps on Facebook.

Almost all the obnoxious behaviour that is being crawled over by Leveson is already illegal. Harassment is illegal. Phone-hacking is illegal. Bribing a police officer is illegal. They are offences that can be dealt with by enforcing existing law. The rest is the result of a profit-driven debasement of popular culture that goes way beyond Leveson’s remit. The NUJ has an excellent Code of Conduct which all of its members are obliged to abide by. Why not apply the same code to the publications for whom we work?

Another One Bites the Dust

The picture above, of Kids Inspire Director Sue Jochim, was taken for Community Care a while ago, but there won’t be any more commissions or repro fees coming my way from that source. The current print issue will be the last - the next will appear online only. The award-winning weekly for care professionals is the fifth of my long-standing magazine clients to close this year.

Print is dying, slowly strangled by the move to the web of both advertisers and readers. Figures for the first six months of 2011 showed a decline in the magazine’s circulation of 21% year on year, to 32,568. Even that is deceptive: all but 4000 were distributed free. The free-to-view online version gets 300,000 visitors a month, carries classified ads and a subscription-based reference service.

Community Care’s difficulties were compounded by its being so firmly rooted in the public sector, heavily affected by government spending cuts. The closure means publishers RBI will make savings on printing costs and the net loss of seven jobs. The photography budget has been in noticeable decline for some time, and will no doubt diminish further. Not that long ago NUJ recommended rates were the norm: £70 for a quarter page, £100 for a half, etc.. These have already been replaced by cut-price agency deals, with payments commonly at a flat rate of £15 or £20. That may work for the big picture libraries, but not many photographers will find such rates viable. Even on the web serious photography needs to be adequately rewarded if it is to survive.

Global Village

The tent dwellers of Occupy London have quickly become part of the London landscape. City business types stride through the new shanty town nestling up against St.Paul’s Cathedral without batting an eyelid. Tourists doing their rounds can tick off two landmarks in one go. The camp is well organised, and seems to have established a daily routine. Anyone who wishes can drop in to the twice-daily General Assemblies to listen or speak. In the middle of the city, it has something of a village atmosphere. It has succeeded brilliantly in forcing the issue of corporate greed onto the political agenda. What happens next is unclear. It is also unclear when, how, or even if, it will end. More pictures here.

Dole not Coal

I first went to South Yorkshire during the big wave of pit closures of the early 1990s, and I’ve been back a few times since. The miners fought the closures and lost. “Coal not Dole” was their rallying cry, but the collieries were bulldozed back into green fields. Now, in their place, stand tin shed-style warehouses and call centres offering small numbers of jobs at the minimum wage. In the intervening years some new, high tech, manufacturing has established itself, but nothing providing the large-scale employment required to make up for the huge job losses of the last 30 years.

Successive governments have made only token gestures. One in four young people in Barnsley and Doncaster are NEETs (not in employment, education or training), one of the highest rates in the country. Last week I visited three inventive social enterprises providing training and apprenticeships (picture below). Even they have been hit by cuts in Education Maintenance Allowance and abolition of the Future Jobs Fund. And in these austere times, employability is no guarantee of employment. Life was hard in the former coalfields long before the current recession – and it’s likely to get worse. This set of images - work in progress – is a partial record of some of the changes.

Shock and Awe: Total Policing explained

In September the newly appointed Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Bernard Hogan-Howe, set out his plan for policing the capital.

"As Commissioner, I have three simple aims: I want us to cut crime, cut costs, and continue to develop the culture of the organisation, and to do all that based on simple but important values of humility, transparency and integrity. We will do that through what I call 'total policing'."

His statement was largely meaningless, but yesterday’s tuition fees protest in the City of London – the first student demonstration since the summer riots – gave some indication of how he intends to go about his business.

It was by far the most heavily policed demonstration I can remember, with about as many police officers (4000) as protesters, and preceded by threats of plastic bullets. From the point at which I joined it, close to the Law Courts, all side streets were sealed off with double barriers and up to three lines of police. The marchers were corralled into a very slowly moving kettle by mounted police, solid lines of officers on foot, and a large number in full riot gear. In New Fetter Lane the march was brought to a standstill for a considerable time, for no apparent reason, and the horses, surrounded by marchers unable to move away, became visibly restless. It looked dangerous, and felt very much as though the democratic right to protest was being honoured, if at all, in letter only.

Another casualty of the new Commissioner’s cunning plan may be the working relationship between police and photojournalists, recently much improved following discussions between the Met, the NUJ, the BPPA and others. For the first time in a while, I was refused passage out of a march despite showing my press card. If this is what humility, transparency and integrity looks like. I’m quite happy with whatever it was we had before. More pictures here.

In the Picture

At many public events these days it seems that almost every hand is clutching a camera-phone, and every eye is watching the world through a screen. Very often, many of those hands get in my way. And if they’re recording a video, rather than a quick snap, it’s worse: they’re almost as big a nuisance as TV camera operators, blocking the view for the duration.

Most professionals have enough self-awareness to avoid making things too difficult for fellow photographers working close by, but the phone-wielders only have eyes for their screens – and there’s a limit to the number of times that can make a picture.

The phone pictured above shows WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange speaking to a crowd at the recent Occupy the London Stock Exchange protest. If you’re interested in that sort of thing, it’s a Samsung. More pictures here.

Lifestyle Tourism

The crowds that crammed into Westfield Stratford City last week appeared to confirm the owners’ press release description of the shopping complex as “a new lifestyle destination for East London”, behaving more like tourists than serious consumers. They certainly weren’t buying very much. Primark was doing a reasonable trade, but it didn’t seem like enough to pay a return on the £1.8 billion spent on construction, or keep the 10,000 new staff in secure employment.

With money scarce on the east side of town, the largest urban shopping centre in Europe is more of a hang-out than a place to spend hard-earned cash. Except the “gateway” to the London 2012 Olympic Park is private property and crawling with security guards, and after the benevolent free-for-all of the opening week, the welcome to all and sundry (including photographers) is likely to wear thin quite quickly.

As the largest regeneration project ever undertaken in the UK it raises a lot of questions. The most obvious is - what will it actually contribute to the economy? Its 250 shops are not making anything, just selling stuff that used to be sold somewhere else. The UK’s largest casino, due to open later in the year, will move money from the pockets of the punters to the pockets of the owners, creating nothing. The new jobs, however close to the minimum wage, will probably benefit those who get them, but only at the expense of those who used to do them elsewhere. And if there are any profits, they will accrue to the joint owners in Australia (Westfield), Holland (APG) and North America (the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board).

Will people buy more than they did before? I doubt it. And what will happen to the jobs and businesses in the Stratford Centre, the down-at-heel concrete mall directly opposite the new development?

Unless European economies are thrown totally off-kilter by a Greek default, Stratford City will doubtless do well when the Olympics come to town next summer. But after that? We must wait and see.

More pictures here.

263 CDs

Tala Skari, Director of Photography at the International Herald Tribune, was at a loss to explain the number of Italian photographers queuing to show her pictures of Gaza at this year’s Visa Pour L’Image. Festival Director Jean-François Leroy was in despair after receiving 263 CDs of Tahrir Square photographs as exhibition submissions. Rubbernecking in the areas set aside for portfolio reviews by agencies and editors during the professional week of the annual celebration of photojournalism in Perpignan suggests that to maintain your street cred, you really do need to have a set from somewhere in the Middle East, preferably Libya. I exaggerate – but not much.

The narrow range of subject matter on show was striking. Of the 24 exhibitions hung in churches and other buildings in the old city centre, 19 were on third world subjects. The remaining five included a group show on the Japanese earthquake and tsunami, a very fine B&W essay on the devastating effects of gang warfare in Los Angeles, and two on UK subjects: a comic Martin Parr-style take on the English by Peter Dench, and a set on an East End gangster family by Jocelyn Bain Hogg. And there were the fish – a wonderfully colourful show of 30 years of underwater photography by Brian Skerry that stood in complete contrast to everything else, presumably selected to offer a little light relief.

Of course, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with third world subjects. Fernando Moleres’s photographs of children in African prisons, for instance, together with his campaigning work around the issue, are totally admirable. Many of the other exhibitions were very powerful, often shot with great sensitivity. I particularly liked Jonas Bendiksen’s essay on climate change in Bangladesh, which captured the great dignity of his subjects. But there was nothing on the global economic crisis. Or anything much at all of real significance about the so-called ‘developed’ world: the enormous changes in working lives; the staggering contrasts of wealth and poverty; the pressing social issues.

Why is that? Why such extensive exploration of third world problems, and none of our own? Perhaps photographers (almost exclusively from the industrialised countries) are being realistic when they go for the ever more exotic or violent. Publishers have their own priorities, and this is what sells. Or perhaps photographers are just not looking hard enough at what is going on around them.

In fact, there are photographers working on other issues, but their work rarely appears in the high profile publications whose editors are so eagerly sought out by aspiring globetrotters in Perpignan. Visa Pour L’Image is a great institution but, although it sees itself as the standard-bearer of international photojournalism, it really only represents one, rather limited, sub-genre.

Access All Areas (almost)

The photographs above and below, shot in Musgrave Park Hospital, Belfast, are unusual. Not in the way they were taken, or for any exceptional artistic merit - but because they were taken at all.

I’ve written before about the ever-increasing privatisation of public space, the restrictions this imposes on our freedom of action, and how the public realm is becoming a smaller and smaller place. This modern day version of the Enclosures has not only handed control of our streets to private corporations, but also our hospitals, schools, prisons, sports centres and more. As a result, photography in many such workplaces has been almost impossible in recent years.

These photographs are evidence that the move from public to private can be, and is being, reversed. In Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales all contracting out of hospital cleaning and many other hospital ancillary services has ended. The relevant authorities have ditched ideology and realised that they are better off with directly employed staff.

It’s not the sort of thing that gets on the front pages, but it has had a big impact on the quality of services, and on the wages, terms and conditions of the workers who provide them. And it means that, almost for the first time since the introduction of compulsory competitive tendering in the mid-1980s, it is possible to record something of their working lives.

Private companies are accountable to their shareholders, concerned for their image, and unwilling to grant access to independent photographers or journalists who might provide the wrong sort of publicity – and overstretched workers on the minimum wage and lousy terms and conditions are unlikely to make good PR. Walking around hospitals in Belfast and Glasgow recently with a camera and a trade union rep from Unison, talking to directly employed staff proud to be back as part of the hospital team, was a pleasure I hadn’t experienced for nearly 25 years. I look forward to being able to do the same closer to home.

More pictures here. A video interview with Unison Branch Secretary Tom Hughes is here.