Muddled message

Muddled message

I’ve just looked at a picture that is supposed to be highly symbolic. It is, but what I can’t work out is what it symbolises – whether it’s ironic, or seriously meant. Anyway, I gave it a miss with the vote button.
I’m currently racing through a book by Harold Evans, one-time editor of the Sunday Times. It’s probably going to be behind a couple of blogs, because it poses interesting questions about the importance of cropping (and not cropping), image selection, and the ‘decisive moment’.



There are also big questions about truth and lies. This matters to press people (really: it does, at least to most of them), and it should probably matter to the rest of us. It’s a theme that two of my friends here on Ephotozine have explicitly looked at – philtaylorphoto shoots for local and national press, and miseawell has shot images of Black Lives Matter protests in his part of Utah.

I’ll be honest – I’m not interested in shooting most possibly-newsworthy events – there are usually more important things to do, like ringing the emergency services or persuading a shocked car crash victim that she should not go to look for her mobile out on the M6 if it’s serious. If it isn’t that much of a problem, then it feels intrusive to be one more person taking pictures of a private moment.



But we all, sometimes, photograph things that are really important to us, and occasionally the creative bug bites and requires us to photograph something that doesn’t necessarily state its message clearly.
Evans is very clear that captions matter, as do headlines. If you want to make a big statement about (for instance) Brexit or the government’s competence, it needs to be as clear as a political cartoon.

My images are old, from 2005 and the Make Poverty History march in London. It was a very good-natured event, the most disruptive part being a march past Downing Street with a chant of ‘Wake up, Tony’ at a rather early hour of the morning. It wasn’t challenging to take the pictures.



I’ll leave you with an approximation of the slogan on the wristbands that so many of us wore, so that there’s no doubt where I stand on the issues. There’s a link between poverty and so many of the other ills in society, almost certainly including the transmission of Covid-19 from bats to humans.

Drop the debt. More and better aid. Fair trade not free trade.