Reportage

“  How far still?…. “

It’s May 1st – May Day – summer is around the corner. So it’s a Bank Holiday weekend ( do banks deserve holidays anymore? ) so here’s comes the rain and temperature drop just to keep us all in our place and put those barbecues and sunglasses away. The morning of May 1st also spotlights the great British eccentrics keeping alive traditions that go back to our pagan past on the isles. It is the heralding of summer and fertility ( summer officially starts in June ) dating back from the Roman festival of Flora and beyond. From the anglo-saxon, Þrimilci-mōnaþ, to the Christian mass of Roodmass – Christianity loved to piggyback on pagan customs and claim them for the new religion. To oncoming days of May day queens, maypoles, morris dancing, English country pubs, real ale, garlands of flowers, well dressing, the start of the cricket season. This morning to Oxford and the broadsheets’ favourite, the early morning song of the choir  atop the Great Tower of Magdalen college ( followed by the more recent ‘tradition’ of some bright-young-things jumping off Magdalen bridge into the river Cherwell and potential paralysis ).

I had hoped to post some images this morning of a notable tradition here in Sussex, but having hurt my back ( running ) a couple of days ago I am currently doing an impression of a very unsprightly ninety year old man, so couldn’t make the early morning walk up the South Downs to Chanctonbury Ring. The remains of a small Iron Age hillfort and a Roman temple, the ring is now a landmark thanks to the trees planted by a landowner in the eighteenth century. Many of these trees were felled by the great storm of 1987 and the replanted ones are slowly restoring this feature. Like many geographical features locally, it is connected to the Devil – very supersitious lot they were in Sussex it seems. By running around the ring seven times, some say twelve, in an anti-clockwise direction the Devil, by some versions, as the church bell in the plain below tolls, it is said will appear in the branches of a tree to offer you a bowl of soup in exchange for your soul. Seems pretty cheap to me but this legend has encouraged my kids to walk up the hill and try to run around the Ring to summon up the Devil – not worked yet! But back  to the tradition of May 1.

Every May 1st, the Chanctonbury Ring Morris Men, arrive atop the Ring to dance at 7am and welcome the sun and ‘summer’. As I say I couldn’t make it this year, but here the weather looked cloudy and it is starting to rain as I write so not sure how it went today. But hopefully next year I’ll get to witness a sunrise there as I did in 2005 as seen in this small slideshow below.

Another old photo and again from 1992. This shot also made the BPPA ( British Press Photographers’ Association ) book, Five Thousand Days – Press Photography in a Changing World, to mark the reformation of the BPPA after 5000 days absence. Obviously quite a major event in the UK that year – my main memory is trying to get to Windsor from my home in Clapham on a Friday evening and the chaotic traffic, after a call from The Times night picture editor asking if I ” could go and have a look “. Shot from a nearby bridge on a tripod that had decided that evening to develop a fault – it hit the bin when I got home. Then the car dash back to London and across to the East End and News International’s base in Wapping. Big prints were made up and run down to the back bench ( remember these were pre-digital days ). This image ended up running across most of the front page the next morning, and I even made my local pub for last orders, clutching a print.

Shifting through some archive cds today I came across this assignment from 2002. A “day in the life” reportage following the senior associate and Senior Vice President at the London regional office of Prudential Capital Group (PRICOA). A day spent full of meetings as part of their role in seeking out companies needing private placement investment. Shot on a Nikon D1X ( how digital has moved on ! ) and tilt / shift lenses.

Driving back from Oxford at the weekend I had to fill up the car’s fuel tank, an increasingly painful experience. I can remember driving past a petrol station in south London one morning several years ago, surprised at seeing the price at £0.49p per litre – the average petrol price in the UK is currently is around £1.12ppl – I paid £1.14ppl for my diesel on Saturday! But back in September 2000 the country was effectively crippled by the petrol crisis. Led by lorry drivers and farmers, this first protest, there have been two smaller ones since, was a protest about the ever increasing cost of fuel and in particular the fuel duty tax that made up the bulk of the cost for UK drivers – around 81.5%, with vat, then of the total cost of unleaded petrol.

In a decade, vehicle fuel had gone from being some of the cheapest in Europe to almost the most expensive due to continual tax rises. A fuel price escalator introduced in 1993 by John Major’s Conservative government, ‘meant to discourage motor vehicle use and combat climate change’, set the annual rise for fuel duty at 3%, it soon changed to 5%. This increased to 6% under Tony Blair’s administration. Combined with the price of oil hitting $30 per barrel  ( current predictions see it reaching $100 this summer ) something snapped in the British psyche, or at least in that of the hauliers. In a very Gallic style protest, lorries pulled across the gates of oil refineries around the UK in direct action. Soon panic buying set in, long queues formed at petrol stations, with TV crews providing a distraction for drivers as they told others at home they were rather silly not to get down there too, join the queue and fill up before meltdown. Some protesters were calling for a 15 to 26p reduction in the pump price, effectively calling on the Government to cut the tax. Petrol stations began to close due to a lack of supply, some put up their prices, there was talk after four days that fuel would run out completely in 48 hours, even train services suffered. Often fuel was restricted to the emergency services.

Against this background, as I was about to go out to the park with my young daughter, I got a call from the Tesco Corporate Communications Department. They asked if I could leave right then and shoot images for a brochure that the company was preparing to document their staffs’ efforts during the crisis. It was a open brief to shoot what I found at three Tesco stores and a distribution depot, around the South-East. I was armed with a fax from Tesco HQ giving me access to the pumps if needed although disappointingly I had no need to wave this about. Some of the resulting images are here below. All this when petrol was almost 33p cheaper per litre than now and a barrel of crude oil a third of the cost it could soon become! ( PS: Check out the price of a loaf of bread in the fifth photo )

All images shot on a Nikon F5.

Earlier today a surreal demo/protest/gathering occurred in Trafalgar Square in central London. Surreal in that rather than covering another demo, in that historic location for civil protest, photographers were the subjects themselves – cue lots of cameras pointing at each other.

Around two thousand photographers, both professional and amateur, keen students and cynical old hacks, came together for a ‘mass gathering’. I believe to call it a protest can mean you need permission from the authorities. There was no march down Whitehall though shouting ” Maggie, Maggie, Maggie, Out, Out, Out”. Replacing ‘Maggie’ with ‘the misuse by police constables of the stop and search powers in Section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000′ – doesn’t have quite the same ring!  Even the placards were tiny.

But the reason behind the gathering is serious. As the BBC reported, ” The demonstration comes after a year of rising tensions between professional photographers and police over the exact scope of Section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000″. I should add, also a year of rising publicity about the situation, with both National newspapers and Television news programmes – there were TV crews there today – taking notice of the often absurd incidents this Act has caused. With the powers to stop and search given to the police in this Act meaning photographers – professional and amateur alike – are stopped from shooting images of churches in The City or sunsets over London, even a fish and chip shop on the pretext of security, while seemingly, would-be terrorists carry on their recces using the cameras in their mobile phones or google earth, probably unmolested. Is security enhanced for the private citizen or is it a jobsworths charter?  The gathering was organised by the campaign, I’m a Photographer, not a terrorist to raise awareness in the ramifications of the Act’s enforcement. Hopefully last weeks ruling by the European Court of Human Rights that the stop and search powers detailed in this act breached the right to privacy may change the way police forces are implementing it.

But back to the event, what do a couple of thousand photographers standing in Trafalgar Square on a cold, dull January day, do? Answer, desperately shoot anything that moves or that doesn’t. Any child holding a placard, anyone dressed up ( always some happy to oblige – Guy Fawkes, gorillas, fake policemen, nuns – even if their cause can be for something else). But most of all each other and then again each other in one chaotic group photo/bun fight! And this is not a criticism, but I’ve a sneaking feeling that this will feature in a lot of student folios at the end of this year!

BPPA chairman, Jeff Moore, being interviewed by TV in Trafalgar Square

Another of my favourite shots, again from 1992. It came out of an assignment for The Times to cover a lookalike contest in London one Sunday morning. Looking for something different from the photocall type shot, I spotted the Marilyn Monroe lookalike sat outside the entrants tents and watched as entrants came out to go onstage. One of the first to come out was a security officer from Birmingham dressed as Mr Spock from Star Trek.  The serious, ‘logical’ character seemed to contrast well with the laughing Monroe and this was the shot that was published in the paper. In 2004 it also made, along with another image,  the BPPA ( British Press Photographers’ Association ) book, Five Thousand Days – Press Photography in a Changing World, to mark the reformation of the BPPA after 5000 days absence! As a student I used to buy the yearbooks of press photography ( Assignments ) that the association in it’s previous incarnation produced in the late 1980s.

Happy New Year! Before the season disappears completely I thought I’d add a shot from a Christmas long ago.

Shot on assignment for The Times on Christmas Day back in 1992 at the end of my first full year there. The then Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr George Carey was getting ready in his office for the Christmas Day sermon at Canterbury Cathedral. Shooting as he got dressed in his formal robes , I had been waiting for him to put on his mitre, when this shot appeared as a member of his staff disappeared behind him holding up his robe.

Back at the paper it was one of those (rare) shots that sailed into the paper – the archbishop and his ‘angel’ wings. In my years at the paper I worked every Christmas Day ( pre-children! ) and an early morning assignment at Canterbury became a regular feature for me. After all Christmas Day was the only day of the year the paper paid double ( about what assistants earn now on advertising shoots! ). I even managed to get a large print of this shot signed by the Archbishop but sadly it was destroyed several years later in a flooded cellar. The other regular Christmas event was rather different, chasing the hunt/saboteurs/police at some meet on Boxing Day.