G20-20 visions

After countless hours of research, meetings, plans and tactic proposals, the G20 rolled into town on Wednesday for a few days of PnP (politics and protests).

First job of the day was a visit to Maggie’s Cancer Care unit in Hammersmith with Michelle Obama and Sarah Brown.  Usually a pool job means one photographer and possibly a film crew will be allowed access to the event due to security and space restrictions.  The results will then be shared among certain agencies and new outlets and all is good with the world. Knowing how the US media works, it didn’t come as too much of a shock to find that the pool actually involved four photographers and two camera crews.  Bahh..  Thankfully, things went well and I managed to get a few frames before grabbing a lift back to town in the travelling media bus.

After editing en route (travel sickness has been pretty much overcome due to forced wiring of pictures in cars and buses) I headed to the Bank of England for the planned “Meltdown in the City” demo.

After days of build-up from the media (damn their speckly hides), protestors and police, hyping the threat of violence, it soon became clear that 40% of the crowd were journalists with the slightest oddity being pounced on by gangs of photographers and TV crews within milliseconds. As police units began to close off roads and pen protestors into certain areas, scuffles began to break out on the front-line.  As is always the case with these events, a small group of people come to cause trouble and, combined with young kids who are out on their first protest and buzzing like tartrazine-guzzlers, flashpoints occur.

I’m a big supporter of the energy and belief that “the youth” and students are prepared to bring onto the streets during demos but it is thoroughly frustrating to see how insincere some of them are. I would never dream of telling them not to do it as it’s important to voice your feelings but their knowledge is so wafer-thin. I’m not joking when I say they had painted their faces, chalked “today capitalism ends” onto the Bank of England and ended the day discussing how they taught the world a lesson as they sip their latte in Starbucks around the corner.

One group I ran into later in the evening asked how they could get past the police blocks to get back into the protest as they’d been to the pub for a few hours but were now wanting to join in again.  They have as much passion to smash the system as an episode of Heartbeat.

Anyhow, inevitably the cocktail of testosterone, alcohol, bravado and a full compliment of willing press resulted in the first window being broken at the RBS bank.  Within minutes, a semicircle of TV crews and photographers had gathered as windows were smashed and the offices were raided with keyboards and monitors soon being waved in the air.  It’s difficult for me to write about the media’s part in this as it’s very easy to criticise it’s part in both encouraging violence and portraying the events in a twisted way.

My defence to this is that despite the recent march through London going smoothly with no violence, our coverage was just as in-depth with four photographers covering the route and rally to the end.  If I’m at a different event and it turns violent, I’ll cover that too but the pictures will be so much more dramatic that people will want to see them as they’re unusual and interesting.  Also, I’m guessing that the same people who were shouting about police brutality if they were pushed may soon cry of censorship if the smashed windows and violence had received no coverage at all in the news. Just a guess of course but it certainly seems a possibility.

Back at the demo, events soon calmed down again and the day-time protestors headed home leaving a die-hard group within the cordon.  Once the police were happy that the remaining people weren’t planning on going anywhere, they closed the area down again and penned them in.  By this point, I was outside the cordon sending pictures so on my return, I found myself blocked from entering.  Grrr.. People who asked were genuinely surprised to hear that I couldn’t come and go as I please with my media pass but that’s a thing of the past. With so many members of the press at events like this from all companies ranging from international agencies to local papers and campaign freesheets, if they allowed everyone with a presscard to move around as they wished, they’d have been no point in trying to stop anyone.  Very frustrating to us but there’s a part of me that understands.  I guess that’s what makes the cat and mouse side of getting back in so much fun..

After an hour or so of patrolling the perimeter, fortune saw me in the right place at the right time as another flashpoint erupted and I could slip into the frontline again.  By this time, the light was fading and as the protestors were herded through the Square Mile, fires were lit in the road and smoke filled the air.

As the police managed to dilute the crowds, I filed my last pictures of the day and headed back for a debriefing in the office.

With everything still in one piece, it was time to head home and get some kip before day 2 kicked off.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 3rd, 2009 at 3:46 pm. It is filed under The working day and tagged with anarchist, bank, banking, capitalism, capitalist, clash, demo, demonstration, G20, leon neal, leonneal, london, news, news photographer, photographer, photography, photojournalist, police, protest, protesters, protestors, rbs, riot. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.