Thank Credit Crunchie, it’s Black Friday..

In my previous work for The Times, the monthly week of shifts for the business desk was seen as a bit of creative desert so as a Radio 4 discussion programme talked of the next four years of global recession, a part of my brain withered a little.  Does this herald the beginning of half a decade of banging my head against the wall of economic news photography?

As the media looked at ways to illustrate the story, after shooting branches of banks and credit cards, the next route saw the square mile of the City of London being flooded with photographers and film crews shooting the city workers as they popped out for their lunch.

Thankfully, I got the chance to shoot on the floor of a brokers in the financial district and experience a taste of “Wall Street – UK”.  Having only seen this side of business in TV shows and films, it was incredible to see that all of the clichés are true.

For around two minutes, all was seemingly peaceful with the brokers manning their phones, checking their screens and generally looking like a regular office then suddenly a unintelligible yell went out and immediately everyone was on their feet, phone cords stretching and twisting around each other as they shout, wave, point and curse each other.  Within 30 seconds, the panic dies down and they’re back to near-normality.  The career lifespan of these guys has to be so short as there is no way that it can be a healthy environment.  Giant fridges full of water and soft drinks are all around the office with big bins near the desks full of hastily discarded empties, flashing screens and whiteboards fill every wall and with such heightened bursts of adrenaline throughout the whole day, it’s amazing they don’t all end up nervous wrecks.

In the back offices, when the lunch girl came around with her trolley of snacks, she opened the door and yells “lunch” to attract attention but when she headed onto the trade floor, in a Pavlovian-stylee, she produced a little bell so that she could be heard through the yells of the bellowing city boys.

Thankfully while I was shooting, the Bank of England announced their interest rate cut so I got an extra bonanza of frantic fun and fiscal fizz.

With attention still focused on the trouble and strife of the CityFolk, the week got harder and harder to illustrate as the ravenous media beastie chewed out every idea we had on ways to show the credit crunch.

The next logical stage in the coverage of the crisis is to show how it impacts the everyday punter but until the person in the street begins to be directly affected, you’ll see the streets of square mile crawling with increasingly baffled news crews.  Bring on stage two!

This entry was posted on Monday, October 13th, 2008 at 5:05 pm. It is filed under The working day and tagged with black friday, credit crunch, federal reserve, financial, ftse, journalism, leon neal, leonneal, markets shares, media, meltdown, money, news, photographer, photography, recession. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.