postal voting...

... has been getting a fair bit of press for all the wrong reasons, like being linked to election fraud.

Really, though, it is meant to give people who are (most likely) not around on election day the opportunity to still cast their vote.

This very concept implies that postal votes need to be cast well in advance of the actual election. Or at least that seems obvious to me. To those who don't see it that way, let me explain:

The London election for mayor is on 3 May 2012.

I am freelance and when I work, it's mostly abroad.

The likelihood of me not being in London on any given day is fairly high, so I registered for postal voting.

The polling cards for non-postal voters arrived in the mail around late March, if I remember correctly. Let's be generous and say they arrived at the beginning of April. I received, about a week later, a letter informing me that I should get worried and call for assistance "if I have not received" my "postal voting papers by 27 April". A Friday. Seven calendar days before the election, and just before a weekend. Say I didn't get the papers. The earliest anyone could do something about it is by Monday.

Assuming also that I opted for postal voting because - remember? - I would presumably not be there on Thursday. And - in my case - not on Wednesday nor on Tuesday and Monday, either. That's my chance to vote gone to hell.

If then, as in my case, you are also away all the week that the postal voting papers are being sent out, you can see how tight time gets.

In my case, I did find the papers on Saturday 28 April. Now it's Monday, and I've finally had time to fill in the ballot papers, spending too much time again considering who to vote for. Stupid me for taking it all so seriously, right?

Now I'm not sure if I trust the Royal Mail to get the letter to the right place on time. I may take the envelope to the polling station in person on the day. But then again, just like the Monday to Thursday job in Holland didn't happen, anybody can call me now for work on Thursday. So either I pay at least one day's fee for my right to vote, or I waive it altogether.

I used postal voting to cast my vote in German elections while I already lived in the UK, and I always had plenty of time to fill in the papers in a considered manner and send them off without worrying the time would be too short for my vote to make it into the count.

Receiving postal voting papers within 4 business days of the election is clearly not enough time.

That should worry people just as much as the alleged fraud, because it may mean that people who are perfectly entitled to it, are robbed of their vote, because either their filled-in ballot papers are still in the mail when the counting begins, or they themselves were already gone by the time their papers finally land on their door mat.

why I seem to be using hipstamatic all the time...

reward...

I have been asked by friends and have subsequently asked myself why I have put my camera away and have for most of this year taken pictures exclusively on the iPhone, and recently, even more 'limiting', with the Hipstamatic application, rather than editing the images afterwards in Snapseed (the very best iPhone photo processing app in my book).

Maybe I have to go back a little bit, and this first thought is actually confusing the picture even more but bear with me if you will.

Before I got my iPhone 4S in November last year, I had heard and read so much about the iPhone, and mainly on Twitter had witnessed a fair number of pro and semi pro photographers turn into complete iPhone nuts. Forgive the term but it seemed to me like so much hype, and who would, having much better equipment, even choose to make technically worse pictures than he or she could, right?

At around about the same time I felt I needed to reassess my own photographic path. I had learned a lot about equipment and to take better pictures in terms of composition and using manual camera settings, thanks to someone who turned out to be a true mentor in that respect, after all the jokes we had cracked about that word in the beginning. However, I increasingly felt that I was taking pictures fulfilling someone else's criteria of a good picture, needing someone else's approval (another personal weakness of mine), and in the process I grew somewhat alienated from my own work and in fact stopped taking pictures altogether for a while.

This realisation combined with that dinky new toy with its lots of brilliant (or trashy) apps allowed me to get over the confusion of not knowing what kind of photographer I was by getting me to play again. I am now taking pictures like I did with my little plastic 16 square exposures on 12 exposure film camera that I got for Christmas at age twelve or thirteen or so. Technically as good as a plastic lens, heads to trees for focus settings, and clouds to sun for exposure would allow you to be; the more important thing being what was in the frame.

Hipstamatic is even more limiting. You have a 'lens' and a 'film' combination and no control other than choosing that combination. I find right now, this very fact allows me to focus exclusively on composition and, even more so, on the mood I want to capture through it.

This is my argument for all those people who moan everywhere that cheap apps 'make any picture look nice, no matter how bad it is', thus devaluing 'good' photography, i.e. pictures taken with expensive (and hence still somewhat exclusive) gear.

I disagree on two counts.

Good camera phone and app pictures still require skill. True, if you take a bland flower picture in gritty b&w, it might add a certain interest to the picture that it wouldn't have in colour. Why? More contrast, focusing on the main thing without colourful distractions around, making it possible for the viewer to find connections: I remember those flowers in my grandma's garden. We had lovely times there. I miss her. It's getting under the skin. I don't think there is anything wrong with it. I rather think it's using what you have available to achieve a certain purpose.

Secondly, the exclusivity of the gear is mostly less dictated by the skill in making good use of such equipment than much more by the size of one's wallet or bank balance.

It's knowing why you are using it that way. We have a saying in Germany that even a blind chicken will find the odd grain. This happens to iPhone shooters, but it also happens to more high-end gear users than would care to admit to it.

Another reason why I like the limitations of what I am using now to take pictures is my attempt not to try to document facts, occasions, buildings, ... whatever, but to get back to taking pictures that evoke emotions. I don't need pixel-peeper-satisfying full-frame sensors and £6000 lenses for that.

I cannot remember her name (my biggest fallacy) but David Land, now editor of F2 magazine, talked in one of his classes at my BTEC course about a US photographer who took amazingly haunting pictures with a Brownie. Blurred, having you engage with the picture to figure out what was going on, with enough detail present to satisfy the search.

Now that you know, maybe my pictures don't look that nice anymore, but hey, I'm trying, and I'll never stop learning.

My final reason to explain why the iPhone is my first choice in most cases: it's just ready to shoot so much faster than my camera...

the love of (self-) important men...

I once knew a painter. I liked his art.

He made me a present. It was a painting called 'The Kiss', and he said it was inspired by us. He gave it to me for my birthday.

Except he asked me to let him show it in an upcoming exhibition. It would be marked as 'sold', and I would get it afterwards.

Then he gifted it to me again for another occasion. Maybe Christmas. I should check my journal but I can't be bothered.

Then he gifted it to me again, I think. I hope you guess what follows. We broke up without me ever actually getting my present.

One day long after our break-up he rang me one Saturday to meet in one of our regular late breakfast places in Hampstead. One of the nice things about being with him were extensive informal weekend morning walks.

He was very friendly and only got around to business shortly before we were ready to leave. He then offered me to hand over the painting or to repay me the £1000 I had lent to him over the time we were together. It was clearly very obvious what I would go for as he had someone at his bank on the phone to make the transfer right there and then.

Before we left, he confided in me that anyway, he had sold the painting to a bank for over £3000.

He must have loved me very much indeed.

He did give me a very dull (compared to the original colours) and tiny print of it. No. 2 or 3 of a run of 100, it's a bit smudged. The print has the same place of pride in my flat as Picasso's paintings had at Dora Maar's place when she died. I seem to remember they were found under her wardrobe.

make a smile go around the world...

happy face
Originally uploaded by antje b.

... it really is so easy.

Yesterday I went to collect a parcel that couldn't be delivered to me the day before, from the local sorting office. "Local" on a London scale as is still a 25 minutes walk or several bus stops away.

Normally, the sorting office opens really early but closes at 1pm. For Christmas the normal red card left to inform of a failed delivery had been replaces with a blue one with snowflakes on, but the most important change was made to the opening times which had been extended to a generous 5.30pm.

As I collected my parcel after returning early-ish from work, I told the young man behind the counter that although it clearly was extra work for them, I really appreciated the new opening times and thought they were a great idea.

He beamed at me, said something along the lines of it making their work easier, as well, and that he would pass the comment on.

I left the sorting office also with a smile on my face, and it stayed with me as I pondered how easy it really was to be nice to people, and yet also how rewarding.

It is so easy not to comment on things well done. It's just become an expectation, and usually, things only get said if something doesn't work.

A case in point was the conference I was interpreting at just that very day of yesterday. After the meeting the interpreters weren't given a glass of champagne, as happened recently at a similar event, but someone from the organisers came to the back and told us that there had been very positive feedback about the interpretation, commenting about what a change that made from the normal 'no-news-is-good-news' attitude.

That made me smile and feel appreciated, and I managed to pass this feeling on to the young man at the sorting office. And hopefully, he, too, would get an opportunity do that to someone else at some point.

I used to be one person who would respond more strongly to things that went slightly wrong than to things that went smoothly. Thanks to my currently slightly readjusted brain activity, I find myself being more relaxed in dealing with mishaps and much more willing to express my appreciation for the opposite.

In that sense let me send a smile to the one(s) who made me seek help about negativity.

Pass it on. Generously. :-)

'The Debt' - screening at the Frontline Club...

The screening of ‘The Debt’ by director John Madden at the Frontline Club was announced as a bit of a rarity, moving away from the purely journalistic treatment to the fictionalisation of political issues.

The film, starring Academy-Award winner Helen Mirren, Academy-Award nominee Tom Wilkinson, and Ciaran Hinds, as well as Jessica Chastain and Sam Worthington, picks up in the lives of three Mossad operatives who worked together in the 60ies on a mission in East Berlin to extract Dieter Vogel, known as the ‘Surgeon of Birkenau’, a medical doctor who conducted cruel experiments on concentration camp inmates in Nazi Germany.

The occasion is the launch in 1997 of a book about the operation written by the daughter of the woman in the trio. Not wanting to give a way the plot as the film is going to be on general release in UK cinemas from 30 September, I’ll just talk about one aspect of it that struck a chord with me. To do this, I may have to digress a little.

After the fall of the Wall and German reunification, documentaries and feature films dealing with the ‘trauma’ that was the GDR history were everywhere. Some of them were the usual propaganda with a rather obvious agenda (or straight-forward counter-propaganda, if you want), some was very delicate and thoughtful work, revealing with a great deal of understanding deeper layers underneath the bare facts and leaving viewers to judge.


‘The Debt’, based on an Israeli film from 2007, explores several issues in a similar fashion. Apart from the obvious, Isreal’s policy of actively persuing outside their own jurisdiction those guilty of holocaust crimes, there is the motivation of the three young people to do what they have come together to do; there are the personal relationships within the group, couped up with only each other for company on a dangerous mission abroad; and there is an interesting exploration of the relationship between captive and captors, with the captive cleverly manipulating his captors who will carry a number of the personal issues arising during this mission with them for life.

However, even more interesting was the conflict between honesty and covering up the actual results of a mission, supposedly for the ‘greater good of society’. This in my opinion was as relevant an observation in East Germany as it is in Western democracies today as it is pretty much everywhere in the world. Inevitably at some point personal interests will clash with more powerful people’s personal interests, and under the mantle of ‘the public good’, lies are told.

A very interesting film, well worth watching.

Brian Storm at the Frontline Club...

Could Multimedia Story-telling be the new journalism? Who are its clients and how to survive commercially with it? All highly relevant questions that have been asked a lot recently.

Brian Storm, founder and executive producer of MediaStorm, came up with some assured answers during his fascinating presentation at the Frontline Club.

Being passionate about stills photography, he was shocked to learn that newspaper readers spend no more than 0,6 seconds on average looking at an image. He believes that good photography has so much information contained in it that it deserves to be taken in thoroughly. One way of gently forcing viewers to engage with a photograph beyond a cursory glance is to embed it in a multimedia story, where the makers of the piece decide how long the image remains in front of the viewers’ eyes.

Here is one example of multimedia photography projects that he showed to illustrate the kind of work MediaStorm does.

In Rwanda, in 1994, Hutu militia committed a bloody genocide, murdering one million Tutsis. Many of the Tutsi women were spared, only to be held captive and repeatedly raped. Many became pregnant. Intended Consequences tells their stories. See the project at http://mediastorm.com/publication/intended-consequences

He touched upon some ways to structure a multimedia story to make it compelling viewing: establish empathy with the character(s), using body language, which makes up 80 percent of communication. He spoke about ‘back-timing’, having an element in the imagery that challenges a statement that has just been made. Visual sequences should be little essays, moving without extreme cuts from wide to extreme close-up. Make sure that in cuts the viewer’s eyes can stay in the same place and remain on the point of interest. Take stills in the same format as the video, 16:9, to avoid letter-boxing or crops in the edited piece, and finally, be as ruthless in editing by subtraction as you would be when selecting your portfolio.

Just as interesting is the business model of MediaStorm with four lines for diversity: publication, project specific agency work, production work for others, and teaching online and in workshops. Interestingly, MediaStorm content is available without charge to embed in online publications for the desired reach. In order to show a whole project (story, supplementary stories, photographer’s epilogue) with or without subtitles in several languages, with easy access to options like forward, comment, access to transcripts in several languages, buy related photography books or get involved, MediaStorm has developed its own media player. This code is available to embed free of charge, as long as it’s not tempered with, which means that MediaStorm monetises every view of the story anywhere online, as it and the advertising is running off MediaStorm’s website. To prevent abuse, the back-end control is pure genius: anyone who embeds the player gets a unique ID within the code, and if any tempering with the code is detected, MediaStorm can switch that particular embed off from their end.

Editorial work for partners proved to be particularly interesting as NGOs and non-profit organisation begin to seek partnerships with journalists rather than straight marketing to get their message out. They want awareness raised by people who know how to get a story in depth, i.e. journalists, and even tend to pay more for such projects than regular editorial clients. Also, this can develop into long-term partnerships with updates and new stories in the future.

Due to the huge amount of really interesting information there was little time for questions. One that was particuarly relevant to photographers ‘crossing over’ raised the issue of video work compromising the stills photography. Storm replied that one needed to allow enough time for ‘hunting’ (getting the right stills) and ‘fishing’ (filming).

It was certainly one of the most informative and positive presentations about journalism and its future forms that this blogger has seen.

to have or not to have...

aunt and nephew
Originally uploaded by antje b.

Today my attention was drawn to this article about the intention of the Department of Health to introduce independent counselling for women wanting to terminate a pregnancy, sold as ‘tightening the rules’. I agree that it could effectively be that if the independent counselling caused undue delay, seeing as medical abortions (pill) are only done within the first 9 weeks and anything beyond that up to 24 weeks requires progressively more invasive procedures.

I was a little intrigued by the fact that I was interested in this as it is not necessarily all that relevant to me anymore. Still, I am a strong advocate of a woman’s right to choose whether a pregnancy is what she wants or, if it was a genuine mistake in the heat of the moment (literally), to have the chance to wash her hands off it like the man can at any time, in the hope of a more cautious approach the next time.

I would like to share my experience with you. I had a termination at 27 years of age. I was in a relationship with someone who didn’t want a child at the time I told him the ‘good news’. He was a very good musician and sound technician but due to circumstances in his life largely depended on his car to make some money mini-cabbing outside clubs he used to play in. I was just beginning to find my feet as a freelance interpreter and translator.

Maybe I should have given my partner the benefit of the doubt and the chance to rise to the occasion, although he had said he didn’t want the child. Maybe I was right to be what I thought realistic about me being unable to handle a pregnancy, the early stages of motherhood AND being the sole breadwinner in that ‘family’.

Be that as it may, I was scared of the profound change that was bound to happen, the leap of faith against all odds that was required, and my potential failure to look after a child and myself without entirely depending on someone else. I was on holidays when I found out, so had a good week of debating with myself what to do. And believe me, when you know there is a life growing inside you, there is not much else you can think about!

In the end I went for the termination, and looking back at this decision now, it was based on sound arguments that would convince me even today that what I did was right. (edited) What I would have done differently with hindsight is confide in more people, especially my family, and trust their advice rather than thinking I had to face it all by myself. (edited)

When I got married 9 years later, I got pregnant within a few months. The relationship was a bit shaky at the time for reasons I won’t go into in detail. Suffise it to say that I didn’t want to keep my man tied to me through a child. I wanted him to stay with me because that’s what he wanted. I went to a family planning clinic again but when they checked me, I was told that my pregnancy seemed less progressed than it should be given the time. Tests confirmed that the foetus I carried inside me was already ‘dead’. While that news did come as a shock, I was kind of glad that I didn’t have to go behind my husband's back to get rid of the pregnancy or otherwise blackmail him into making a decision about me based around a child of his, which really were the only options.

In each of the three following years I got pregnant again but lost all of those pregnancies again in the first trimester. Thorough checks confirmed there was no scarring of the uterus from the initial termination, so that was ruled out as a cause of the spontaneous abortions, as were other physical causes or genetic problems. To the last day the specialists shrugged it off as one of those things.

At least the last two of those times I really wanted the baby. I felt ready to devote myself to teaching another human being about life. I didn’t feel it would take away from my work ambitions, which by and large I have realised. And yes, on the odd occasion I thought of the child I had aborted when I was 27 and who would now be about 16 with a tinge of regret.

What has made me ready to have a child now (that it is probably too late), is knowing that you simply cannot plan for everything anyway but that resourceful people will always find a way to cope. I am confident now that I would have acquired the skills necessary ‘on the job’, just like pretty much every other mother throughout the history of mankind. But I am also aware that I didn’t have that confidence then, and that is what made all the difference.

I stand by my decision made nearly 17 years ago. I am in favour of every woman being able to make that decision, preferably together with the man who fathered the child. Just take this from me as you weigh your, your sexual partner’s and your possible child’s life options, though: the time rarely ever seems right if you have to earn your own living, there are many things you will be unprepared for, your flat may be too small, your job uncertain, and it may all just seem too much for you to bear. But where there’s a will, there will always be a way, too. Don’t just let fear decide as fear of the unknown will always be there with every profound life decision. :-)

evening at the frontline club: the price of sex (screening)

Yesterday I visited another event at the Frontline Club, championing independent journalism. I sometimes write posts for their blog, and yesterday it was about a screening of a documentary, becoming one of my favourite events at the club.

Photojournalist and filmmaker Mimi Chakarova introduced her film The Price of Sex about women sold into sex slavery with the plea to ‘stay with us’. She was keen, she said, to observe the audience’s reaction.

The film follows three women from Bulgaria and Moldova who managed to escape from the vicious trap they had naively walked into at a young age and were prepared to go on the record with their clearly painful and humiliating experiences. Three of a worldwide number of 1.5 million women traded for sex, according to UN estimates.

The film explores those young women’s origins. Post-communist Eastern Europe with its mainly rural existence, the young generation leaving for the West to follow the lure of better-paid jobs or even any jobs at all... some of them turning out to be false promises.

There was a look at the traders, some of them women effectively betraying their own (all three women in the film were initially lured abroad and sold by women).

There was a description of the conditions sex slaves are held in, without papers, blackmailed into submission, in squalid lodgings they must not leave, working off their ‘debt’ at a rate of up to 50 clients a day.

There was an attempt to talk to punters. The statements from some clients in Turkey who were prepared to go on camera were truly mind-boggling. Equally telling was the testimony of a former pimp, even more so his friends’ attempts to stop him talking.

There was also a look at law enforcement and NGO responses to human trafficking and its fall-out, both doing their best but seemingly fighting a losing battle. The probably most enraging revelation was that foreign funds Moldova receives to fight human trafficking don’t benefit the victims but effectively help maintain the country’s status as ‘Europe’s biggest exporter of women’.

The questions after the screening explored the perceived incompleteness of the film as it focussed on Eastern Europe as the origin of the traded women and their destiniations when we are clearly dealing with a global phenomenon, which Chakarova said was intentional as the story was built around the three main characters.

Other contributions bemoaned the lack of a more thorough forray into the demand side of the equation, making the sex slave trade such a profitable proposition in the first place, and questioned what the film intended to achieve.

The reply to the final question, how legislation on prostitution might solve the problem, was typical of the entire discussion. Chakarova maintained that the film, a result of years of work on what was originally a photojournalistic project, was the best she could do. She never set out to answer all the questions and let the audience go home slightly shocked but in the comfortable knowledge that the issue was taken care of. She encourages her viewers to become involved, to care enough to find answers to their questions by themselves, and to act accordingly - to contribute their ‘Granito’, their grain of sand, to what has to be a collective effort, in reference to a previous film screening at the Frontline Club.

child's play...

invisible...
Originally uploaded by antje b.

I just read this article in the Guardian about findings regarding the loss of physical strength in 10-year-olds, with one in ten in 2008 unable or unwilling to hold his own body weight hanging from a bar, when in 1998 it had been one in 20. With at the same time a comparable body mass index, indicating that the children, for the same weight, are carrying less muscle and instead more fat around with them.

Until I was 9 years old, we lived in a rented flat in one of 3 low-rise blocks built from yellow brick in the 1930ies. They hemmed in a huge courtyard with a little fenced-in garden with some fruit trees, a broken and disused concrete paddling pool that I only ever saw water in after the rain, some wild patch of grass and shrubs and two rows of garages in the centre, surrounded by a footpath, and a square of lawn lined by hedges for every back entrance of the buildings with room to hang the washing... and for children to play.

There was no official playground in that yard but there were trees and a little hill at the far end to climb, catch and hide and seek to play, and the footpath around the centre island of the courtyard served as a bicycle track for the children who knew how to ride a bike already. I remember I was out there every day, except when it was raining.

I also went to a creche from 6 months (when my mum's maternity leave was over), and then from age 3 to kindergarten. Both of them equipped with fantastic playgrounds, and there, too, we would have at least a couple of hours a day playing outside, weather permitting.

When we moved to the Baltic Sea, the new sprawling estate there had several playgrounds to make sure children didn't have to go too far from home to play. Again, we were out pretty much every day. Apart from that, I had ballet classes and gymnastics training to keep me moving by then.

Change of scene: In 1993 I lived in Lyham Road right behind Brixton prison, renting a room from an elderly lady whose son and daughter-in-law with their two little boys lived just next door. The boys were out playing a lot, too, but only in the narrow and bare strip of a garden behind their council house, and only with each other. On his first day in school, the older boy was taken home after one hour because he was crying the whole time. Suddenly he was surrounded by several children his own age and not his little brother, and he couldn't cope!

The nearest playground in that street was probably a kilometer and definitely at least one very busy road away. Not a way I would like my children to take routinely just to get to play. I like the playgrounds in London's parks, but the nearest one to where I currently live is a 15 minute walk away. Again, although there is less traffic here, it is not a distance I'd be comfortable letting under 10-year-olds walk by themselves. So a parent always has to go along, and has to have the time to, instead of being able to shout down from the window that it's dinner time.

It is a great shame that there are so few playgrounds around in the UK, and it's a great shame that there are so many reasons to fear for your children's safety when they are out and about by themselves. And now we see it doesn't just affect children's social skills, it makes them physically weaker, too.

Amnesty! When they are all free

another of my blogposts for the Frontline Club

Kate Townsend, executive producer for BBC Four's international documentary strand Storyville, introduced the film about the 50 year long story of Amnesty International.

The opening sequence set the scene with statements about Amnesty as the right place for people who “liked to cause mischief and put it to good use”, that Amnesty was the “McDonald’s of human rights” to Jack Straw’s: “If people do nothing, nothing will happen.” The film goes on to tell the story of not so much an organisation, but a movement, that started 50 years ago and is still going strong, despite questions about its objectives and the way it goes about achieving them.

After the screening James Rogan, director of the film, Claudio Cordone, Senior Director of Research and Regional Programs for Amnesty International, Patricia Feeney, former Amnesty researcher for Argentina, and Dr. Stephen Hopgood, Reader in International Relations at SOAS and Amnesty biographer, answered questions about the film and its subject.

Claudio Cordone classed it as the best documentary about the organisation so far, acknowledging that 50 years was a long time to condense into just over one hour, and that the issues chosen were necessarily limited but still representative of Amnesty’s work, successes and difficulties.

With its widening remit from initially purely pressing for the release of prisoners of conscience to the current work on broader human rights, like ending poverty, violence against women, and homophobia, tensions have appeared between the broad base of the membership, which was and remains in the European and North American middle class, people with enough time and ressources to care about issues other than their own, and the specific needs of those fighting conditions in their own countries. The campaign against homophobia in Uganda was cited as an example where Amnesty as a Western NGO might not be as helpful as it would like to be due to the perception there of homosexuality as an essentially Western evil.

A long-time worker for Amnesty in the audience defended the organisation against the “McDonald’s of human rights” label, pointing out that Amnesty had always worked by asking those affected what kind of help they needed instead of presenting a “set menu” of options that did not necessarily fit the purpose of those whom they tried to help.

Other questions probed changes Amnesty International made after being criticised for their hesitant response to Rwanda, the rift at times between its principles and practice, as in the controversial pay-off of its General Secretary Irine Khan at a time when the organisation was fighting poverty elsewhere, as well as Amnesty’s roll in the Arab Spring.

James Rogan summarised it well when he said that in initial talks about the documentary the reaction had been critical with questions raised about whether Amnesty had lost its way. However, there was a bigger message: Amnesty International as a movement is about people with the luxury of being free to protest, and using that freedom on behalf of those who don’t have it. As a principle, there is only so much anyone could find fault with that.