If you have something to say...
Say it on the Huffington Post
If you have something to say...
Say it on the Huffington Post
The Blog
Over the past couple of weeks I have visited Occupy's Finsbury Square camp several times and each time have returned home disappointed with the pictures and the interviews.
The camp at Finsbury Square seems to have changed a little. Familiar faces are missing, and one rickety shelter I watched being constructed only two weeks or so ago, near the kitchen tent, has been demolished - whether by accident (it was waiting to happen) or design I couldn't establish.
Occupy London has created an additional rod for its back: its acceptance of numerous rough sleepers and substance abusers in the camps. Like moths to a flame, they have found a place to stay that's better than a shop doorway.
Occupy is a young movement. I can understand that chaos is to some extent inevitable, that messages are mixed, that among your numbers you have people who like nothing better than to put on a mask or a scarf and have a ding-dong with the cops. But you need to be more coherent, more focused or you'll lose the 98%.
Why should Occupy be different to any other organisation where mixed agendas struggle to get to the top of the pile? There are people who through sheer force of personality will have a stronger voice, a winning argument. Occupy is no different from the real world.
When I first started visiting the Occupy London camps at St Paul's and Finsbury Square, what struck me most were the mixed messages. The camps are not short of creative people who come up with dozens of different slogans. But therein lies the problem for me.
Jimmy. Photographed on Sunday 26 February just after he'd been into St Paul's Cathedral to show them his documents from the Land Registry. Quite why Jimmy decided to pose shirtless is anyone's guess - I thought he was going to strip naked!
Occupy's St Paul's camp is no more. It was evicted in the early hours of 28 February - and now that it has gone, it's so much easier to see the value to Occupy of the camp and its location.
I was not a fan of the Occupy LSX camped at St Pauls. I had an open mind to begin with and if anything, instinctively lent towards them. On the day Ed Miliband was reported to be in support of them I went down to check out the scene. Let's just say I wasn't impressed.
The City of London police have carried out illegal evictions before in a futile attempt to stem the Occupy movement, but the sinister pre-dawn demolition of the school building shows the government getting more desperate to end the extra-parliamentary movements against forced austerity.
In the early hours of 28 February 2012, the bailiffs and the police moved in on the Occupy LSX camp at St Paul's Cathedral. Several small skirmishes and several arrests later, the camp is gone. I was not there - I am not a news photographer - but I do feel a sort of sadness.
I met Elijah a couple of weeks back when I started shooting images at the Occupy LSX camp at St Paul's Cathedral. I was photographing Indigo, his girlfriend as she sat in the entrance of their tent. Elijah was inside, in the shadows, embellishing some of Indigo's answers to my questions, as I took shot after shot of her.
The music industry must play a role in improving working conditions under these companies, and they've done it before. 20 years ago most band merchandise - t-shirts, patches, hoodies - was, like most apparel, manufactured in sweatshops in China. Now most bands use fair trade certified suppliers for their merch.
It's cold in the Occupation Records office - a UBS-owned building on Sun Street, now occupied by the activities of Occupy London. I drag myself out of the warmth of my bed - a half deflated air mattress and a bundle of sleeping bags - and reach for my phone whose ring has demanded I get up.
The question we should be asking is not whether Occupy London the camp will go, but what will happen when it is gone? In other words, what will be different this year, because of this extraordinarily successful protest last year?
On the 31 October 1958, a celebrated intellectual delivered a speech in Oxford called "The Two Concepts of Liberty" and it has defined our view of freedom ever since.
