Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2000/05/02

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Subject: Re: [Leica] leica riot
From: Johnny Deadman <deadman@jukebox.demon.co.uk>
Date: Tue, 02 May 2000 08:50:24 +0100

on 1/5/00 8:20 PM, Mike Stone at mike.stone1@virgin.net wrote:

> Johnny
> 
> Good to know you made it through safely. I spent 3 hours round
> Parliament Sq/Westminster and had retired to the pub before it kicked
> off in Trafalgar Sq. To be honest, from what I saw it was totally
> over-hyped. The angry mob must have been keeping their powder dry
> because there were more hangers on, tourists, press, TV and
> photographers than participants in my time down there and aside from
> digging up the grass and spray painting Winston it was the regular crew
> of jugglers and unicyclists rather than anything political. The apathy
> of modern youth perhaps.

Yeah, that was it at the start. There were more leicas than demonstrators!
It built up really slowly, and parliament sq became flake central. I think
my best picture from that phase was a drunk guy with a guitar who leapt on
top of a police van and started doing johnny rotten poses with big ben in
the b/g.

However, you could see the anarcho types were getting irritated that nothing
was happening. A lot of them were busy getting pissed (drunk) (they are
known as the 'bru (=special brew) crew' to the other eco types). I was
astounded at how young some of those who turned out to be the most violent
were... maybe 15 or 16.

I could detect no political agenda at all amongst this lot.

It was when they started marching up Whitehall that the mood changed. I
found the whole thing really depressing, frankly. For most of the afternoon
the demonstrators were outnumbered by the press, even when the 'violence'
(it was hardly ever that while I was there) kicked off. I stuck around at
what amounted to the front line for a couple of hours, dodging bottles and
getting pushed back by shields etc, but in the end I realised that I was
becoming part of the problem so I skipped out.

The cops are generally the most interesting people (for me) to photograph at
these kinds of things.  I've thought for a while that I would like to do
some kind of a photo series about the police, and in particular the policing
of mass events (see http://www.pinkheadedbug.com/uneasystreets for a start
to this). The pressure and rules they are working under are very intense. I
went up the side streets as well and chatted to them... they seemed
incredibly relaxed considering everything. One Inspector told me they got
nervous when photographers photographed them directly, but none of them
tried to stop me even when I got very close. Unlike the anarchists...

The only organisation of any kind seemed to be the Reclaim the Streets gang,
who shimmied up trees and lamp posts to string banners around Parliament Sq.

It was only when I stood at the top of whitehall and looked down that I
realised there were a hell of a lot of people there. The whole street was
heaving.

It's only afterwards you realise what the best photo ops are/might have
been. I don't think I got it in a specific shot, but the best photo WOULD
have been a huge scrum of photogs and cameramen around a single demonstrator
taunting a massive row of riot cops. In particular, when the march first
reached downing street (I was at the front) the most extraordinary situation
evolved, with a line of cops facing out, and facing them not demonstrators
but a solid phalanx of cameramen and photogs, with the protestors lobbing
bottles from behind the true front line. The face of modern protest. Maybe
it's there in the pix, I dunno.

I decided to photograph this because I thought it might represent something
in the zeitgeist... you know... the liberal state suddenly finding itself
confronted with a deliberately disorganised manifestation of dissent and
finding itself deploying riot police in exactly the way the generation they
displaced and despised did before them.

But in fact it wasn't anything so significant, though it had its moments.
Some of them rather sad, like the eco-flake family who turned up on rusty
bicycles with some dead tree branches. Others sort of touching, like the
copper trying to persuade a protestor not to climb any further up a lamp
post by humurously telling him how dangerous it was, which started to really
scare the protestor, who couldn't decide whether to go up and risk his life
or come down and be arrested.
- --
Johnny Deadman

photos:      http://www.pinkheadedbug.com
music:       http://www.jukebox.demon.co.uk