City of London Police Prove they Still haven’t got the Memo

Yesterday, I read a piece by Jane Fae Ozimek, which I have summed up here. Jane wrote that on Monday, a professional photographer was looking for a location on London Wall appropriate to a portrait of one of the architects responsible for the City’s changing skyline.

He went to One Aldermanbury Square, where the security guard asserted that the photographer could not take photos of the building. The photographer pointed out that the security guard was wrong. The police were called.

Apparently, four officers arrived, followed by a police van with flashing lights. He was detained, he claims, under Section 44(2) of the Terrorism Act 2000.

This controversial law permits police to stop any individual for the purpose of preventing terrorism. While police officers acting under this section do not require reasonable grounds for a search, they may do so where there are grounds for suspecting the photography is linked to terrorist activity. That said, the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) has in recent months made it clear that photographers are not fair game for random stop and search.

In a strongly worded statement, Chief Constable Andy Trotter, chairman of ACPO’s media advisory group stated:

“Everyone … has a right to take photographs and film in public places. Taking photographs … is not normally cause for suspicion and there are no powers prohibiting the taking of photographs, film or digital images in a public place.”

This message appears not to have been passed on to City of London Police. Despite the photographer explaining that he was taking photos as part of his job, the police were not satisfied. Allegedly, he was then restrained forcibly by another officer, while the first officer went through his pockets, removing his camera and mobile phone. The photographer described how the officers were cheered by his discomfiture, both mental and physical.

He claims: “the police officer went through my pannier, flipping through personal notebooks, gingerly peeking in a plastic bag that contained a towel and swimmers, still wet from my earlier swim. He located my wallet, and pulled out my drivers licence with obvious glee.”

At the end of the search, the police departed, having failed to return his mobile phone to him. The Terrorism Act does entitle a PC to seize any item which “he reasonably suspects is intended to be used in connection with terrorism”. If the PC genuinely believed the photographer to be carrying the tools of terror on him, it was clearly perverse to leave him free to carry out the rest of his mission, photographing buildings around the City of London.

The writer of this piece, Jane Fae Ozimek, asked the City of London Police to comment on this incident – specifically asking them for their views on the removal of the phone. An official spokeswoman told us:

“A man was spoken to by officers yesterday after police were called by security personnel. He was later searched under terrorism powers.”

What about the phone? No comment.

What about suggestions that the City of London continues to abuse powers long after other forces have stopped? She added:

“We continue to work to make sure the city remains a safe place to work and visit.”

Unless, added Jane, your work includes taking photographs, in which case the safety of neither yourself nor your property can be guaranteed.

You can read the original piece here: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/05/11/police_photographers_terrorism_act/

LIDF 2010 aims to explore the differences between photography and film-making as well as considering how they converge. Professionals from the film, photography and radio industries will all join panels and lead workshops and participatory events. There are two documentary photography workshops, a photographic treasure hunt around Bloomsbury and a visual exploration of Hackney and NE London. Among the exhibitions is Toby Smith’s ‘Madagascar: Bois de Rose’ and we wish him every success. Smith has been documenting illegal deforestation in Madagascar, within UNESCO-protected rainforests. Part of the LIDF, the exhibition runs from 17 to 26 April 2010 in Barbican Mezzanine, Silk Street, London. Admission is free.

For more information about the LIDF visit http://www.lidf.co.uk/

Hi, Polly here. I thought it might be useful to have these examples of how we work up somewhere – so I’m popping them into our blog…

Client: LECG

Sector: Global Expert Services and Consulting Company - http://www.lecg.com

Brief: Portraits for Graduate Recruitment Brochure

“We like the way Matt puts everyone at ease - he really gets the best out of people”. We needed images for our new graduate recruitment brochure and we wanted to get across that LECG is a fun working environment - without being too wild and whacky! Matt now comes in every six months or so to photograph new recruits and he and his assistant create a great selection of images for us to choose from.”

Amy Kilbane, European Marketing Manager, LECG

LECG is a global expert services and consulting firm, with approximately 800 experts and professionals in 31 offices around the world. LECG is recognized worldwide for deploying leading academic, governmental and consulting experts on significant engagements in the public and private sectors.

LECG call on us to ensure their imagery upholds the look and feel of their brand. We provide corporate portraits of their ever-expanding team of consulting professionals. On this occasion LECG had a specific brochure in mind for graduate recruitment, we took a relaxed shot of each person as well as a more formal
portrait, allowing 10 minutes for each person, and shot everyone on location at LECG’s London offices.

Client: GRASS ROOTS EVENTCOM LTD

Sector: Events and Communications Company - http://www.grassrootseventcom.uk.com/

Brief: Grass Roots EventCom Recognition VIP Weekend

“We work with a lot of photographers on client events and needed someone to capture images for our own employee recognition VIP weekend trip. A colleague recommended Matt for this job. We needed a photographer who could just get on with it and capture scene setting shots and social shots as well as interiors and exteriors - basically everything and everyone without getting in the way! I’m happy to say that we got great shots and Matt and his team were really helpful. I have recommended Matt to other colleagues now too.”

Lindsay Hammersley, Marketing Manager, Grass Roots EventCom Ltd

Grass Roots EventCom Ltd provides expertise in events and communication. As part of a 12-month recognition scheme, the ultimate achievers were rewarded with a VIP weekend in London. They asked Matt to capture the event - from limo arrivals, dining in top venues, interactive cookery demonstrations and theatre visits to iconic London imagery from the top of a London bus!

We are proud that when this major events company had their own event they came to us for the images.

Client: WFCA for Budgens

Sector: Advertising - http://www.wfca.co.uk/advertising-agency/

Brief: Independent Retailer Recruitment

“I’ve got a rather nice brief for a Budgens photo project and I thought of you!”

Jo Cornford, Budgens Account Director for WFCA

WFCA is a complete service agency and for that past two years have been a Campaign top 30 agency and a Sunday Times Fast Track 100 business. WFCA’s client, Budgens, has local stores that are a viable alternative to the superstore.

Independent retailers, working in partnership with Budgens, own many local Budgens stores. They care deeply about the quality, provenance and value of the food they sell and the communities, which they serve. Budgens and WFCA are working hard to convey this message.

Updating their existing image library plays an important role in their communications - they wanted to capture the spirit of shopping at Budgens as it is today. They need natural lifestyle shots - of the stores and, of course, the people.

It’s an ongoing project (Budgens has over 227 stores!) and we continue to shoot on location all over the UK using Budgens staff, friends, family and a few models.

Jo Cornford explains further:

“We asked Matt to carry out this project because we know we will get the high standard of imagery that we need. Matt’s ability to put people at their ease and capture natural lifestyle shots is exactly what we require.”

Client: PAN Advertising

Sector: Advertising - http://www.pancomms.com

Brief: Christmas Card

“We had worked with Matt Wain Photogrpahy before, so when we were looking for a one-stop solution for our Christmas shoot they were the natural choice. Matts’ personable nature, good humour and his ability
to get the most out of people, was a massive help in guaranteeing a painless shoot for what, potentially, could have been a creative and logistical nightmare!”

Roy Robertson, Creative Services Director, PAN Advertising

PAN Advertising is a full-service healthcare advertising and communications agency. PAN came up with the concept of a hospital scene for their Christmas card and our brief was to produce a funny image based on this concept using every single member of Pan’s 35-strong staff. PAN also wanted us to orchestrate the whole shoot so that all they had to do was turn up on the day. We did just that: we sourced the location, the props and wardrobe. On the day, we shot the image in 7 sections, which were then digitally combined to produce the final shot.

And the end result went down a storm!

Client: Carillion

Sector: Construction - http://www.carillionplc.com

Brief: Document an 80-metre bridge lift

Carillion’s challenge was to lift into place four, eighty-metre steel beams to complete a bridge for the A27 road upgrade in East Sussex, when the main rail line could only be shut for five hours – from 1 ‘til 5 in the morning. Over successive nights Carillion achieved their objective.

Tanja Clark, Business Development Manager for Carillion comments:

“Working with Matt is always a pleasure. He has that special something, that rare ability, to capture a sunny moment in an otherwise dull and dreary day – or night!”

Matt documented the lift and captured a fabulous shot that won an honourary mention in the Lucie awards this year. He explains:

“I really love this shot, it reminds me of those 1950’s American Steam railway photographs by O Winston. (www.linkmuseum.org)”

Client: Hendon Prep School

Sector: Education - http://www.cognitaschools.co.uk

Brief: School prospectus and Web literature

“Now that I am going through the pictures again after having had a break, I like them even more than when you first took them. I am one happy customer! I nearly didn’t call because I thought I’d never be able to afford you!”

Leah Brown, Marketing Manager, Hendon Prep School

Hendon Prep School was planning a new prospectus and looking for a range of shots that captured the personality of the school and its pupils. As well as featuring in the prospectus the shots would also be used on their website and across a broad range of promotional literature.

With his trademark natural approach, Matt’s reportage-style images are moments captured - a day in the life of the school, from the serious business of learning to the youthful energy displayed on the sports field.

Matt achieved all they needed in one day and teachers and pupils had a goodtime alike. We will always do our level best to work to a budget and will not let a tight budget get in the way of a good result.

With Matt off to the US this week, I’m already looking forward to the images he’ll bring back.

This has led my non-creative brain to ponder where visually creative people generally find their inspiration. Is it from things they see – or do they draw on their other senses too, or other things entirely –

and does it matter?

Some people believe that different colours represent different emotions and that any “mood” created through music, poems, literature etc

can be translated visually and would influence photographical expressions. I wonder if this is only if the photographer is aware of the theory – or if it still works on a subconscious level if not.

I imagine that past visual experiences probably come to mind when creating an image. And many photographers seem to quote ‘life’ as their inspiration. Pretty indisputable I guess – Wilde’s “life imitates art far more than art imitates life” springs to mind.

Many arty types are synesthetes to some degree and can cross-reference their senses – sadly the colour orange doesn’t sound like anything to me!

One photographer noted that for her, smells are truly inspiring in her work. Another chap declares that he is inspired by ‘nothing’, which seems crazy before he goes on to explain that he meditates before going out to capture nature photographs and by clearing his mind he notices more and reacts more spontaneously.

This same person still finds that music goes round in his mind – this seems to affect us all, maybe some of us just don’t use it for anything!

On a limb here – I think Matt’s inspiration often comes from just being somewhere and soaking it up - getting to know the place or the people he’s with.

I was reading about a photographer recently (Alan Babbit) who has Parkinson’s and found he had ‘lost his muse’ when he was diagnosed. He went on to have a “Eureka!” moment and from then said he used his ‘shakes’ to explore a new and different approach to his art.

So perhaps it doesn’t matter how they are inspired, just as long as they are.

Why did you start the Migrations project?

The Migrations project is the continuation of my previous project Workers. It is the second chapter of the same story. While I was shooting Workers over six or seven years, I saw that we were inside a total transformation of the ways of production. With the end of the first industrial revolution and the arrival of the new technology–intelligent machines–on the line of production, with the new organization of factors of production, I saw that human beings and their traditional, sedentary way of life were also beginning to transform.

By millions, workers are put out of work by mass production, pushed out of the fields, from regions to other regions. They come into towns for jobs. Each year this migration amounts to 120 million field workers, ten times the population of a city like New York. In industry and service it’s about the same.

It used to be that most of the population lived in the fields, but we made a complete reversal: the world has become urban. Cities like Paris, New York and London, these are the towns of the past. The towns of the future are Bombay, Mexico, Manila, Jakarta, São Paulo. They used to have 4 or 5 million people, now they have fifteen. More than 150 towns in India now have more than a million people.

In Brazil for instance there used to be hundreds of farms with several hundred thousand families living on them. Now they have been replaced by a few enormous farms in a logic of monoculture agricultural production that employs some of the ex-owners as part-time workers under limited contracts. Brazil for instance has become the first producer of oranges which are sold to the American market and partly replaces Florida’s production, which is very variable because of fluctuations in climate.

On a personal level, migration is a story that I know quite well: I was born on a farm in Brazil. When I was five years old I came to a city to live. When I was fifteen years old I left my small city for a middle-sized town of one hundred twenty thousand people where I met my wife Lélia Deluiz Wanick. Thirty-three years ago we went to live in São Paulo. Then, for political reasons, it was necessary for us to abandon our country for France. And today I am still a foreign person living in a foreign country.

What do you hope to accomplish with this project?

I am not a judge of what’s good or what’s bad. My pictures are only a cross-section of what happens through this cycle of displacement and migration. For seven years I traveled to 47 different countries. I shoot globally and I want to show globally: each of my stories is about globalization and ecomomic liberalization: a sample of the human condition on the planet today.

My big hope is to aid and provoke a debate so that we can discuss the human condition looking from the point of view of displaced peoples around the world. My photographs are like a vector that link what is happening and give the person who does not have the opportunity to go there the possibility to look. I hope that the person who comes into my show and the person who comes out are not quite the same.

I believe that the way the rich countries in the world live is the right way to live. Any person has the right to have health, education, social assistance, the right and need to be a citizen. I believe that each human being on this planet must have the same. And interestingly, we have enough resources to make a better world for each of us.

What is the relationship of this body of work with your previous work?

All my work is linked together like different chapters of the same story: my pictures of Latin American peasants’ fight for survival, my pictures of the Sahel, those of the refugees and displaced populations, those about workers, they are all about human beings fighting for their dignity and trying to live better together. I am trying to be coherent with this small moment in the planet where I live, and in the end my pictures are a way of life.

Today I am not more or less pessimistic but I am more realistic. I used to think that evolution meant evolution in a positive sense, that we were going towards a better way of life, better relations. Today I understand human behavior a little bit better and I think that evolution can also go in a negative sense. I believe that human beings’ real intelligence is their capacity of adaptation to any condition and this leaves me a bit skeptical about our evolution: do we really know our own true nature?

What could be our contribution to the project?

I believe that the average person can help a lot, not by giving material goods but by giving their participation, by coming to a discussion, by being really preoccupied with what’s going on. It is the most important thing that we can do so that things never happen again in this way. There is a relationship between the poverty around the world and our destruction of the environment. One of the reasons that there is so much poverty is the direct link between the structure of the environment and the population growth. We do not protect our own environment and we have destroyed the forest in most of the tropical countries. In Brazil for instance, by deforestation, by cutting and exporting the wood, by the cattle ranches, by exploiting the mines, we are killing the forest which is the Indian civilization, and the Indians are dying.

With my wife Lélia and a group of friends in Brazil, we fight very hard for the rain forest in the region where I was born. We fight to get the funds to construct a school for the training of primary school teachers, agriculture technicians, farmers and politicians.We are planting 5.1 million trees. It is a big laboratory to contribute to restore the planet in these areas where it is destroyed. Of course we need help on this, discussions and any kind of donation that can plant a tree or change the mentality of a person so they can help change the environment.

Biography

Born in 1944 in Aimorés, Minas Gerais, Brazil, the sixth child and only boy in a family of eight children, the son of a cattle rancher, Sebastião Ribeiro Salgado studied economics in Brazil (1964-1967) and earned his M.A. in economics in 1968 from the University of São Paulo and Vanderbilt University (USA). In 1971 he completed his coursework for his Ph.D. in economics at the University of Paris and worked as an economist for the International Coffee Organization until 1973.

After borrowing his wife Lélia’s camera on a trip to Africa, in 1973 he decided to switch to photography and joined the Sygma photo agency (1974-75) followed by the Gamma agency (1975-1979). He then was elected to membership in the international cooperative, Magnum Photos, and remained with the organization from 1979-94. From his base in Paris he covered news events such as wars in Angola and the Spanish Sahara, the taking of Israeli hostages in Entebbe, the attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan, and also started to pursue more personal and in-depth documentary projects.

For seven years (1977-1984) he roamed Latin America, his native region, walking to remote mountain villages to produce the images for his eventual book and exhibition Other Americas (1986), a meditative exploration of peasant cultures and the cultural resistance of Indians and their descendants in Mexico and Brazil. In the mid-1980s he worked for fifteen months with the French aid group Doctors Without Borders in the drought-stricken Sahel region of Africa and created Sahel: L’Homme en Détresse (Sahel: Man in Distress) (1986), a document on the dignity and endurance of people in their deepest suffering. From 1986 to 1992 he focused on Workers (1993), a documentary shot in 26 countries on the end of large-scale manual labor. After Terra: Struggle of the Landless (1997), a project on those fighting to reclaim their land in his native country of Brazil, Salgado published Migrations and The Children (2000) on the plight of displaced persons, refugees and migrants in 41 countries.

A world-renowned photographer and part of the tradition of “concerned photography,” Sebastião Salgado has been awarded virtually every major photographic prize and award in recognition of his accomplishments from institutions around the world. In 1994 he founded his own press agency, Amazonas Images, which represents him and his work. He lives in Paris with his wife and collaborator Lélia Wanick Salgado, who has designed most of his books. They have two sons.

Don McCullin was first sent out to photograph the growing hostilities between the Turkish and Greek communities in Cyprus in early 1964 and then the struggle of power in the Congo in the latter part of 1964. It was the arrival of the colour supplements in the mid Sixties that demanded the vital part of photo-journalism in story telling. The developing war in Vietnam was were McCullin wished to be sent, he was suspicious of America’s involvement, and wished to get there as soon as possible. Following the Vietnam War, McCullin covered the starvation in Biafra. For McCullin to see the result of war and the cruelty of starvation, he felt he no longer wished to show concern for the soldiers in action but instead turned his attentions to the tragic consequences of war. After Biafra came the refugees in Bangladesh, the war in Cambodia, Beruit and Iraq.

Don McCullin’s most recent work concentrates on still life and landscape photography. A collection of McCullin’s landscapes of Somerset were published in ‘Open Skies’ (1989)

“I have been manipulated, and I have in turn manipulated others, by recording their response to suffering and misery. So there is guilt in every direction: guilt because I don’t practice religion, guilt because I was able to walk away, while this man was dying of starvation or being murdered by another man with a gun. And I am tired of guilt, tired of saying to myself: “I didn’t kill that man on that photograph, I didn’t starve that child.” That’s why I want to photograph landscapes and flowers. I am sentencing myself to peace.”

Gursky studied under Bernd and Hilla Becher at the Düsseldorf Kunstakademie in the early 1980s and first adopted a style and method closely following Becher’s systematic approach to photography, creating small, black-and-white prints. In the early 1980s, however, he broke from this tradition, using colour film and spontaneous observation to make a series of images of people at leisure, such as hikers, swimmers and skiers, depicted as tiny protagonists in a vast landscape.

Since the 1990s, Gursky has concentrated on sites of commerce and tourism, making work that draws attention to today’s burgeoning high-tech industry and global markets. His imagery ranges from the vast, anonymous architecture of modern day hotel lobbies, apartment buildings and warehouses to stock exchanges and parliaments in places from as far a field as Shanghai, Brasília, Los Angeles and Hong Kong. Although his work adopts the scale and composition of historical landscape paintings, his photographs are often derived from inauspicious sources: a black and white photograph in a newspaper, for example, that is then researched at length before the final photograph is shot and often altered digitally before printing. 

Andreas Gursky was born in Leipzig, Germany in 1955. He has exhibited internationally, including Sydney Biennial (2000), 25th São Paolo Biennial (2002) and Shanghai Biennale (2002). He has had numerous solo exhibitions, including Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg (1998) (touring), Milwaukee Art Museum (1998) (touring). A solo exhibition was organised by Museum of Modern Art (2001) that toured to Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, MCA Chicago and SF MOMA, San Francisco. 

Rimini 2003