The Dustbin of History: Kodachromes

It feels like sacrilege, but I am in the process of binning large numbers of Kodachromes.

In the days of colour film, Kodachrome was the gold standard. It's what the National Geographic photographers used, despite its now unthinkably slow speed (64 ASA, unless you were a masochist and went for the 25). It had other drawbacks: it had to be sent back to Kodak for processing, so couldn't be used on jobs that required a fast turnaround, and, to get the best out of it, accurate exposure was essential. But, correctly exposed, it produced transparencies with great colour, contrast and sharpness, and reputedly better archival stability than any other film. I used it on virtually all my foreign trips through the 1980s and 1990s.

It was only when picture desks started going digital, and image distribution switched from Royal Mail or motorcycle courier to FTP and email, that another disadvantage was revealed: Kodachrome's unique emulsion structure made it quite tricky to scan. Getting the colour and contrast right was not straightforward, and Digital ICE automated dust-removal, which worked well on other colour film stocks, could not be used. That meant dust and scratches had to be removed by hand in Photoshop. Scanning Kodachromes was hard work.

However, that's not why they're in the bin. Distributing images shot on colour transparency film to multiple publications meant shooting multiple frames, or making duplicates after the event.  After each trip one set went into my own filing cabinet, and selections of 'similars' went off to the various picture libraries that also distributed my work. Over the last few years they have all come back, like long lost homing pigeons: many agencies have closed, and those that haven't no longer deal in hard copies.

Once an image has been digitised, identical copies can be made effortlessly, with no loss in quality. There's no need for 'seconds' or spares. So, although I can't bring myself to throw away the original of anything worth scanning, I've finally got round to trawling through the stacks of returned suspension files, comparing 'similars', keeping the best, and dumping the rest.  What I'm doing is completely logical - it just feels like an unforgivable sin.

Pictured above is a binful of hundreds of slides from two trips to the Dominican Republic, for Christian Aid in 1983, and Oxfam in 1991. Scans of some of those I've kept are here.

Dominican Republic 1991

Rodney Bickerstaffe, 1945-2017

NUPE Conference 1988

For most of the 1980s the National Union of Public Employees (NUPE) was one of my most regular, and most enjoyable, sources of work. Its members were the unsung heroes of our public services – ambulance drivers, cleaners, carers, caretakers, cooks, dustmen, home helps, hospital porters and other NHS ancillary staff, street cleaners and more – and my commissions for the NUPE Journal gave me the opportunity to visit a huge variety of workplaces and meet the people who worked in them (more about that here).

The monthly assignments also meant I frequently photographed the union's General Secretary, Rodney Bickerstaffe, whose untimely passing was announced this week. It was always a pleasure. He was wise, witty, warm and, above all, a fantastic public speaker. He will be sorely missed.

Speaking for a national minimum wage at the TUC 1986

No Resting Place

At the beginning of this year, prompted by what seemed to be a recent significant rise in the numbers of people sleeping rough in central London, I set about documenting some of the many dark doorways and uninviting corners in which anxious, disturbed or destitute men and women now spend their days and nights.

I decided to focus on the places, rather than the people who use them, in order to highlight the harsh locations in which rough sleepers find themselves, without identifying the often vulnerable individuals who use them.  Not all the photographs succeed in doing this - parts of faces are visible in one or two. 


 
The pictures were taken on and off from January through March, and now the Greater London Authority has released figures for the numbers of rough sleepers recorded in the capital during that time. I was not surprised. They showed an increase of 7% on the same period last year - to 2,751 individuals over the three months. Nationally, rough sleeping has risen by 37% since 2010.

Each person has their own story, but together the bodies trying to keep warm on cold hard pavements are the most visible symptoms of the current crises in housing and adult social care provision in one of the richest countries in the world.  Shameful.  More pictures here.

The Waste Land

 End of the day on London Bridge 2016

Unreal city,

Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,

A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,

I had not thought death had undone so many.

Sighs, short and infrequent,were exhaled,

And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.

Flowed up the hill and down King William Street...

(from The Waste Land, 1922)

These pictures, recent additions to my London in 50 project, were inspired by TS Eliot's description of commuters crossing London Bridge and dragging themselves to their deathly work in the City of London.  Re-reading The Waste Land, written in 1922, I imagine them in black & white, ghostly shadows in the "brown fog".  But although my pictures were taken on a sunny evening as the financiers and their clerks walked in the opposite direction, their day's work done, nothing much seems to have changed in almost a century.  They still look miserable.

 End of the day on London Bridge 2016

Bringing It All Back Home

In the National Gallery it's Van Gogh's Sunflowers. In the Louvre it's the Mona Lisa. And in Florence it's Botticelli's The Birth of Venus (above). It seems that every major gallery has one iconic work that is the principal focus of selfie attention.

Around these 'trophy' artworks the hushed reverence that was once the default gallery mode has been swept away by smartphone-toting tourists elbowing their way to a clear view on their screens or, even worse, blocking everyone else's by posing for a selfie. Anyone wishing to peacefully contemplate the actual painting in front of them is in for a hard time.

Collecting such photographs is one of the more explicable idiocies of tourism. Perhaps what I have been doing - taking pictures of people taking those pictures – is idiocy squared, but tourism and its idiocies fascinate and repel me in equal measure. Being a tourist traipsing around Europe's big cities, with no connection to anyone who lives there, carefully channeled through a string of 'must-see' landmarks to which no native gives a second glance, can be a deathly experience. Suddenly alighting on something recognisable, both to the viewer and to their Facebook friends back home, makes a connection between the real world and this transient state of novelty and boredom. Maybe that's what photography is all about. 

Florence 2016

More Market Failures

Nine Elms regeneration zone

 There is a striking disjunction between the desperate shortage of affordable housing in the capital, and the extraordinary panorama of cranes, pile-drivers and high-rise residential blocks in various states of construction visible from almost anywhere in the city with a view.

Even more extraordinary, at least to someone unfamiliar with London's dysfunctional property market, is the fact that many of the newly completed apartments transforming the skyline are empty, bought off-plan by overseas investors as convenient assets in which to stash their cash. But now it appears that all is not well in the luxury homes trade.

Battersea Power Station

Last month Morgan Stanley warned that prices of new, upmarket London flats could fall by as much as 20% this year, and the International Business Times reported that Chinese investors who bought apartments off-plan in the Battersea power station development are having second thoughts now the time has come to pay the balance on their relatively small up-front deposits. Those in the know are clearly expecting trouble: although pre-tax profits at the estate agent Foxtons only fell by 3% last year, investors knocked 33% of the share price. If these are the first signs of a bursting bubble, it would be good news for anyone who thinks of four walls and a roof as home, rather than an offshore shelter for their dodgy money.

More pictures here.

Construction of Alto Apartments, Wembley

A Chorus of Disapproval

Members of the ENO chorus in rehearsal, 1998
 

The chorus at the English National Opera has just voted for strike action in protest at proposals to cut four jobs and reduce the current year-long contracts for the remaining 40 singers to nine months. The cuts follow a 30% reduction in the ENO's annual Arts Council grant.

In 1998 I spent a very enjoyable three weeks dropping in on rehearsals for the ENO's world premiere of Gavin Bryars' Doctor Ox's Experiment, shooting backstage, in various rehearsal rooms and even, occasionally, on-stage, for a spread in Opera Now magazine. There's a lot of hanging around in rehearsals and I spent much of it in the very good company of the chorus. I don't know how many of today's strikers were there back then, but they were a diverse, humourous, and pleasingly stroppy bunch. I hope they win. More pictures here.

Director Atom Egoyan and the ENO chorus in rehearsal, 1998

Rehearsal for ENO's Doctor Ox's Experiment, 1998

London in 50

I've created a rotating gallery of pictures taken in my wanderings around the city, some on my way to or from commissioned shoots, a few, requiring special access, by prior arrangement. London in 50 is a work in progress, definitely not definitive. I've delved into the archives for some, but intend that older images will be displaced by new as the gallery evolves.

Dam Nonsense

Hampstead Ponds Project 

Campaigners who failed to stop a £22 million flood defence programme currently underway on Hampstead Heath might do well to reconsider their position following the catastrophic flooding that has devastated northern towns and cities over the last week. 

Many local groups and individuals put up a sustained fight against the Hampstead Heath Ponds Project, largely based on concerns over environmental damage to a unique and much loved open space. The 16 month dam strengthening and spillway construction works across 12 of the heath's 30 ponds, which began in April, has undoubtedly caused significant localised disruption but, as events up north have shown, blocked-off paths, the loss of a few trees, and some unsightly construction equipment are trivial compared to the damage to homes, businesses, and the environment that would result if the existing dams were to fail. 

One of the arguments used by the Dam Nonsense campaign was that newly weakened government legislation rendered much of the work unnecessary. A much more sensible argument is that the floods in the north demonstrate that government attempts to justify cuts in spending on flood defences by such manoeuvres are extremely foolish – and extraordinarily costly. 

 

Hampstead Ponds Project

Uber alles: we're all in this together

Drivers' protest, 12-11-15

When Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell speaks of an army of self-employed workers who have been casualised by the internet, he could be talking about the 100 or so Uber drivers who protested outside the company's London HQ last week (above). But he could also have been talking about some of the freelance photographers documenting their demonstration, hoping to make a sale through one of the big online news photo agencies.

The positions of the two groups are remarkably similar: both provide their own, expensive, equipment; neither have guaranteed hours of work or income; in both cases, terms, conditions and rates are set by the company; and in both cases there seems to be an endless supply of service deliverers struggling to make a living from ever-decreasing rates of pay. The drivers' protest, sparked by an imposed 5% increase in commission, was not the first time they have lost out financially through changes imposed from above.

In a way, Uber is quite honest about its role. The big photo agencies hide behind bland titles. The names of Alamy, Getty, Corbis and the rest promise nothing. Perhaps only Demotix hints at some sort of (non-existent) egalitarian enterprise.

But although Uber calls its drivers 'partners', the company's real relationship to its workforce is pretty much as described by its moniker. In German, of course.

Many of the drivers have now joined the GMB. Hopefully collective action, with its backing, will bring results. It would be good to see photographers attempt something similar.

More pictures here.

Bringing Down the Shutters

Bringing Down the Shutters, my feature for The Journalist magazine on the massive decline in the number of staff photographers working for national and local newspapers, is now available online here.

The Eye of the Beholder

A building I photographed by chance last week has hit the headlines. A poll conducted by Building Design magazine has voted 20 Fenchurch Street winner of the Carbuncle Cup 2015, awarded annually to what the voters consider to be the ugliest building in the UK. The 37 storey City of London tower, designed by Rafael Vinoly and built by Land Securities, and more widely known as the Walkie Talkie building, has had its problems, but it was its distinctiveness and prominence, rather than its awfulness, that struck me when I took the photo (above). It doesn't seem to me to be significantly more objectionable than a number of other grandiose British architectural follies.  But I'm an unreliable witness, easily seduced by an all-to-rare shaft of London sunlight.

The Greater London Clearances (again)

Cressingham Gardens residents protest outside Lambeth Town Hall, July 2015

Last night's decision by Lambeth Council to proceed with demolition of Cressingham Gardens estate in Brixton is of a piece with similar 'regeneration' schemes across the capital. To maximise the use of increasingly valuable central London real estate, the Labour council plans to demolish 306 homes to make way for 464 new ones. Most of the 158 additional units will be sold off, with only 15% let at council rents.

Tenants and leaseholders in the 1960s low-rise blocks bordering Brockwell Park fear they will be priced out of the area many have lived in for decades. Meanwhile the council is caught between a rock and a hard place by central government funding cuts. On paper at least, the scheme looks better than those currently under way in Tory-led Barnet, but that is no consolation to the residents, who stand to lose their homes with no certainty over where they will be put during and after the rebuild, or at what cost.

The trend towards displacement of social renting from an ever-widening area of the city is undesirable for a whole host of reasons – including the break-up of long-established communities, unsustainable pressures on public services in the outlying boroughs, and rising transport costs for low-paid workers forced to commute long distances. Resolving all this cannot be done by the local authorities, Labour or Tory, now left to make the best of a bad job. It requires massive changes in central government housing policy. Don't hold your breath.

Cressingham Gardens residents protest outside Lambeth Town Hall, July 2015

Photo Talk, 7.00pm Wednesday 15th July

 

Speakers' Corner 1993

This Wednesday I will be discussing some current issues in photography with photographer John Gladdy and London Print Studio Director John Phillips.

The Studio gallery is hosting my Speakers' Corner exhibition, and we will be talking about photographing in Hyde Park and other public spaces, ethical boundaries and notions of privacy, what it means to be a photographer in an age of universal camera ownership, and anything else that gets thrown at us.

It's also an out-of-hours chance to see the exhibition, which runs until 25^th July.

7.00pm Wednesday 15th July

London Print Studio, 425 Harrow Road, London W10 4RE
Nearest tube: Westbourne Park

Speakers' Corner exhibition, on to 25th July

Speakers' Corner 1993

London Print Studio is currently hosting an exhibition of photographs from my book Speakers' Corner: Debate, Democracy and Disturbing the Peace, which documents in photos and words almost four decades of the place regarded worldwide as a symbol of free speech and freedom of assembly.

The show runs until Saturday 25^th July, and there will be a talk, by me and others, about photography in public spaces, on Wednesday 15th July at 6.45pm (more details to follow).

Tuesday - Saturday, 10.30-5.30pm.

London Print Studio, 425 Harrow Road, London W10 4RE
Nearest tube: Westbourne Park

 

Speakers' Corner 1978

Regeneration - or Social Cleansing?

Private security guards prevent protesters entering Hendon Town Hall through a window

Barnet Council's apparent total disregard for the welfare of its less well-heeled residents continues to astonish. Yesterday, tenants who have lost their homes on Sweets Way estate in Whetstone, and tenants and leaseholders who face eviction when West Hendon estate is 'regenerated', were refused access to a council meeting in Hendon Town Hall.

Pretty much all services in the borough have been privatised, so handing over West Hendon to a consortium of Barratt Homes and Metropolitan Housing Partnership, and permitting Annington Homes to demolish Sweets Way, is very much in character. But failing to provide appropriate accommodation for the hundreds of households who have lost, or are about to lose, their homes of many years is inexcusable. All this is being done in the name of regeneration. The protesters call it 'social cleansing'. More pictures here, and more on Sweets Way here.

Esmaa Guernaoui, evicted from Sweets Way estate

Private security guards prevent protesters entering Hendon Town Hall

Going, Going, Gone.....

And it wasn't even fun while it lasted.  More pictures here.

Exciting Times

For the second time this week Nick Clegg has lost his radio mic feed in the middle of a live broadcast. On Sunday, a few minutes into a double act on the economy with David Laws (above), people suddenly started scurrying around in front of the podium with hand-held mics, and all the photographers were ushered to the back of the room to stop the barrage of shutter clicks drowning out the resulting rather low-grade audio. When this work-around proved inadequate, the Lib-Dem leader was taken into a back room to have his transmitter adjusted. Apparently he was apoplectic, but managed to re-emerge and continue with gritted teeth well-hidden.

And earlier today The World at One (BBC Radio 4) clearly found a microphone malfunction during the Lib-Dem manifesto launch more interesting than any other aspect of the event, and played its listeners a generous stretch of crackle and dropped syllables.

Is this a deliberate Lib-Dem strategy aimed at livening up what many observers regard as an (until now) extremely dull campaign - or could it be sabotage?  We must be told.  More pictures here.

And Now for Something Completely Different?

Teresa Rodriguez, Podemos candidate for Andalucian President

Voters go to the polls in Andalucia, southern Spain, on Sunday to elect a new regional Parliament and President, following the collapse of a coalition of the centre-left PSOE and Izquierda Unida (United Left).  Podemos, the radical grassroots organisation that grew out of the Indignados movement, is gathering widespread support, and the result will be seen as a significant indicator of what might happen in the countrywide round of regional and municipal elections in May, and the general election that follows.

Pablo Iglesias, Teresa Rodriguez and local Podemos candidate Felix Gill

At a boisterous election rally in Malaga's market square on Saturday (pictures above and below), speeches from Podemos Secretary General Pablo Iglesias and the party's Presidential candidate Teresa Rodriguez, attacking austerity, corruption, incompetence and 'La Casta' (the entrenched governing elite), clearly struck a chord. Both were mobbed on leaving the stage. 'Populist' is often used as a term of condemnation, but this was something completely different. Both would get my vote, if I had one. The contrast with the lacklustre crew preparing for our own May elections could not be more striking. Or depressing.

Last May Podemos won 5 seats in the European Parliament, only three months after formally constituting itself as a sort-of political party*.  Anything could happen.  More pictures here.

* for more detail see Tim Baster and Isabelle Merminod's excellent piece here

Speakers' Corner: Book Publicity (Part One)

Martin Besserman 1996

I have a photo book coming out in May and, following a year-long hiatus (it was accepted for publication in February 2014), am now beginning to grapple with the practicalities of publicising its arrival.

Speakers' Corner: Debate, Democracy and Disturbing the Peace contains around 100 black and white photographs taken on Sunday afternoons in London's Hyde Park between 1977 and 2014. The place has a worldwide reputation as the home of free speech, and a parallel one as (to quote George Orwell) the resort of preachers, eccentrics and "a large variety of plain lunatics". That's a promising combination, and the pictures, many accompanied by excerpts of speeches, heckles and arguments that I recorded at the time, are my attempt at documenting the extraordinary mixture of serious public debate, off-the-wall religiosity, whacky humour and self-regulating anarchic mayhem that has repeatedly drawn me back there.

Stuart Wheeler 1978

Although it's a book that I hope will attract photo enthusiasts, I would be disappointed if it didn't also appeal to a much wider audience: to anyone interested in London history (it is being published by The History Press), politics, religion, popular culture, public debate and opinion. The publicity needs to reflect this, and it seems that social media, of which I am currently only a moderate user, will play an essential role. I'm working on it: this piece is a first step.  More anon.  

And more pictures here.

Argument 2014