image from a google image search of “running across the world” 

Davina poses at the 26th annual Terry Fox Run at Hyde Park in London, England. 

In what I can only view as troubling and a move surely to invite more backlash against photographers, London’s Metropolitan police has launched a new counter-terrorism PR campaign complete with anti-photography propaganda.

The campaign is meant to encourage people to turn in “odd” seeming people that they see taking photographs.

“Thousands of people take photos every day,” reads their advertisement being run in London’s major newspapers. “What if one of them seems odd?”

Having personally been harassed in the past by the U.S. police while out shooting, I worry that this kind of a campaign will result in even more harassment for photographers going forward. In addition to police harassment, I think that this campaign also sends the wrong message to people about photographers and photography. I think it encourages people to think suspiciously of photographers and to add to the climate of fear associated with photography.

Photography is not a crime. Taking photographs is part of a rich tradition of art, social commentary and historical documentation. I’m very disappointed seeing London’s Metropolitan Police decide to take this course of action and worry that this sort of backward thinking will continue to spread the boogeyman myth that photographers and photography are the enemy when they very much are not.

Having people report “odd seeming” photographers will only take important police time away from ways that it could better be spent in really fighting crime and terrorism.

—-Original Post—-
www.flickr.com/photos/thomashawk/2311166742/

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Thank you to Thomas Hawk for the above text.
www.flickr.com/photos/thomashawk/

And to London’s Metropolitan Police for the graphic! 

Francesca in action Once a month, the Hackney Podcast dips into the arts, culture and politics of the borough. The mix is as diverse as the population, with recent features on the Olympics, the Hackney breakfast, and a particularly poetic episode on the area’s watery affinities. Presenter and producer Francesca Panetta answers our questions about hyperlocal podcasting.

Could you give us a little background on where the idea for the podcast came from?
We set it up to explore the different sides of Hackney – it’s one of Britain’s poorest places but culturally one of its richest and most exciting. We wanted to combine local politics, environmental issues and everyday lives with art, literature and music. Part of it is about experimentation – we’re professional programme makers and the Hackney Podcast provides a space with no rules, a platform to push the boundaries of traditional programme making. In our Kingsland Road edition and in the latest water-themed edition, we used sound design, environmental recordings, new music, poetry, readings, and commentary to allow residents to hear their neighbourhood in a completely different way.

How difficult was it to set up, and to keep the monthly momentum going?
Technically it’s extremely easy to set up a podcast. For the online bit we use iWeb which has a podcast template that we’ve tinkered with which sends the programmes automatically to iTunes. Creating the audio is also pretty straightforward. We record using our own microphones with hard disc recorders and we edit on a variety of sound editing programmes on our computers at home. Making quality podcasts isn’t expensive or difficult, you just need good microphone technique and a novel way of approaching a subject.

Keeping the momentum going isn’t hard either. Hackney has endless stories and interesting characters to interview. The problem is less material, and more finding time to do it. We could make a weekly programme easily, but we fit it around our full time jobs!

It’s beautifully produced, and I know you have a producer’s background, but do you use a professional studio to make this?
None of the material is recorded in a studio. It’s part of our philosophy for the podcasts. The programmes are about the borough so all material should have the sound of the area. All links (the formal bits of radio shows that tell you where you are and why) are recorded on location (ie out and about in the area).

What has been your most rewarding experience putting the podcast together?
It’s always most rewarding talking to everyday people. Stopping people on the street to interview them can be daunting but can lead in to unexpected and interesting conversations. It’s a real opportunity to engage with our local community, ask questions that without a microphone you would never dream of asking. Then there is the sense of real community action, or creating meaningful dialogue, when we manage to take these concerns to the decision makers in the borough and hold them to account as we did with fears of the Ridley Road market traders who wished answers from our Mayor Jules Pipe.

Do you have any plans to expand beyond a local podcast? For example, a community website/forum for Hackney residents…video podcast…etc.
As online local communities grow we’d like to grow too. It could be in the way we collect and produce audio (we’re keen to get more professional radio and podcast producers involved in the programmes) or it could be the kind of content we are generating. Our only criteria is innovative and high quality content.

And geographically, it’d be wonderful to see similar podcasts for the other 31 boroughs. Do you have any plans to expand to other areas? If not, any advice for someone who might be interested in recreating your idea elsewhere?
We’d love to see other boroughs in London creating their own podcasts. In fact we’d like to see a global network of local podcasts. It’s outside our capacity to produce more content at the moment but we’d happily work with other teams. Our main piece of advice is the same advice for any good journalism. What story are you trying to tell and how can you best do that?

Good London podcasts are a rare thing. Can you recommend any others?
Visit London and the Guardian are producing six travel podcasts this autumn which will be insider guides to the capital. The series kicks off next week with a tour around Vyner street’s art scene with Jessica Lack.

Despite all it has to offer, many Londoners will not have been to Hackney. Can you suggest three things in the borough that everyone should visit?
The hide at Hackney’s Waterworks is not just for bird fanatics. It’s a peaceful place to spend an afternoon, peering out at the herons and moorhens (although they claim there is far more exotic birdlife to be found there) and the surrounding Hackney marshes provided vast quantities of blackberries this year.

Hackney Wick’s new impromptu flea market gives you an undercover glimpse of the art scene. I found quite a nice striped teapot there last weekend, it’s also an interesting area for fans of industrial architecture.

We love Cafe Oto, the music programming, its Berlin vibe, and are pleased it’s started to serve food.

And tell us one piece of trivia about the area that not even Iain Sinclair would know.
Studio A at The Premises on Hackney Road is solar-powered

Have you ever been sick on the Tube?
No, there are no tubes in Hackney. Everyone cycles!

The Hackney podcast is produced monthly, and is available via iTunes. The next podcast will go live at the end of October, tackling betting in Hackney (with an interview with mayor Jules Pipe and photographer Stephen Gill), a bat walk around Hackney Marshes, and a London Review of Breakfasts review of the Bruncheon Club, one of the areas ‘underground resteraunts’. By M@ in Miscellaneous on 
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London Set | Architecture Set | Night Set

Please don’t use this image on websites, blogs or other media without my explicit permission. © All rights reserved

EXPLORE # 281

We had another wet night and day in London, it just didnt stop! i just managed to take a couple of reflection shots in London at night in Covent Garden

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Covent Garden (pronounced /ˈkɒvənt/) is a district in London, England, located in the easternmost parts of the City of Westminster and the southwestern corner of the London Borough of Camden. The area is dominated by shopping, street performers, and entertainment facilities, and it contains an entrance to the Royal Opera House, which is also widely-known simply as “Covent Garden”, and the bustling Seven Dials area.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covent_Garden

Please don’t use this image on websites, blogs or other media without my explicit permission. © All rights reserved
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London Rain at Night 

Every time I think that Bloomberg has the potential to become in interesting news service, financial or otherwise, they decide to come up with something else entirely. Like today’s Elle Macpherson Can’t Counter London Gloom as Americans Flee –and goes downhill from there: Andrew Wesbecher moved to London from New York in 2006 to sell software to banks and hedge funds. This month he joined the exodus of American expatriates fleeing high taxes and the city’s shrinking financial industry.

I’m the last guy to leave that I know, said Wesbecher, 29, who worked for Tibco Software Inc. and lived in Notting Hill, the London neighborhood that’s home to billionaire Richard Branson and model Elle Macpherson. We are all packing up. Well, actually, Andrew, you’ve all been packing up for the past year, at least, as companies cut back on their expat packages. Expats are expensive for American companies, and many are discovering that they don’t need to send American staff over as much–British staff will do just as nicely. And doesn’t Branson live in Holland Park?
The number of U.S. citizens in Britain fell 3.8 percent to 126,000 in the 12 months through September, according to the Office for National Statistics. The trend probably continued this year, with the Confederation of British Industry estimating the U.K. financial industry will lose about 45,000 jobs in the first nine months of 2009, or 4.3 percent of the total. You know, that’s still a whole lot of Americans in London. Probably far too many, certainly for my taste. Especially since so many of them don’t actually want to be here, and whine about it all the time. Me, I like it here. I manage to stop conversations all the time by stating that I like living here because I like the food and the weather.

Authors Tommy Stubbington and Andrew MacAskill drop their first ball in the next paragraph: Americans are heading home as Britain plans a 50 percent tax rate for those who earn more than 150,000 pounds ($248,000) a year and employers cut benefits for workers living abroad, reducing the allure of London. That comes a year after the U.K. said foreigners who have lived in the country for more than seven years must pay 30,000 pounds annually or give up the special status that shields overseas income from British taxes. Well, lets add a little context here just so everyone knows what’s going on. Expats are expats because they are not local hires. They have special packages, which can be quite generous. Most importantly, they don’t get their paychecks here in the UK. So expat salaries actually count as overseas income. And this can often be a whole lot of money. And since it’s overseas income, it gets treated differently in the UK tax system–so expats get something of a free ride here. And since expats generally get all their expenses covered as well–rent, transport, the guaranteed two trips a year back to the US, school fees–it’s a pretty cushy deal. What the UK is doing here is trying to do what the US does, actually. That’s not the only error here–that 50% tax on incomes over £150,000 is bit more complicated as well. Like the US, the UK has a graduated tax system–incomes under a certain level are taxed at a low tax rate, and as incomes rise, amounts over certain bands are taxed a a higher level. So what is actually happening is amounts over £150,000 are being taxed at 50%, up from the current 40% rate. But everything below that is still taxed at the existing rates So we’ve got two slippery items here already, and we’re only in the fourth paragraph. It goes downhill from here, though:
Expats feel the tone has changed; it’s less welcoming, said Mark Tilden, a consultant at CRA International Inc. who wrote a report for the City of London last year on the impact of taxation on corporate relocation decisions. London’s ability to attract talent has gone down. Well, let’s get a little perspective here–London continues to attract millions a year from Commonwealth countries, and elsewhere, who are perfectly happy to live and work here. And you know what? They’re pretty talented. The large investment bank whose London office I worked for until 2006 was actually doing quite well until they sent a bunch of Americans over to run things–that’s when it blew up. But don’t worry, American exceptionalism will always be with us:
Janet Sherbow lives in London’s Chelsea district with her husband, Nikos Mourkogiannis, the former chief executive officer at the European arm of Cambridge, Massachusetts-based management consulting firm Monitor Co. The family plans to move to Greece after their daughter finishes high school next year.

We are fed up with all the stealth taxes, the non-doms levy, and now the 50 percent tax rate, Sherbow said. Six American families have moved from my street in the last six months. I particularly like the “fed up” part. This is the world’s greatest city, with an unparalleled range of cultural offerings, and one of the most livable cities in the world as well. What’s the problem?

Well, part of he problem is that companies are clearly cutting back on the generosity of the programs for those who still get expat packages:
Forty-one percent of employers plan to review expatriate programs, according to a study by KPMG International. KPMG surveyed about 100 companies, 60 percent based in the U.S., and found that 22 percent had recalled overseas workers or turned them into local employees in the past 12 months. Well, as I said, these programs are expensive for companies to run. And Janet? Those six families? They were probably sent back. That’s part of the deal with being an expat–you can get sent back to the US at a moment’s notice. And you better believe that’s been happening. That doesn’t stop the whining, though: Huddling under an umbrella during a July downpour, Wesbecher said he was no longer willing to put up with the frustrations of life in London after his commissions dropped and Palo Alto, California-based Tibco eliminated his expatriate benefits, cutting his take-home pay by 75 percent.

This is what passes for summer in London, he said, sipping an iced latte in the city’s main financial district. The quality of life is a lot harder. Things are more expensive and the houses are smaller. Even public transport is cramped. A New York subway car is like real estate in comparison. This guy is a moron, clearly. What planet does this guy live on–has he been on New York public transportation recently? And, you know, the economy sucks, so of course his commissions are down. Welcome to the real world, pal. Consider yourself lucky to still have a job. And expensive? Yes. But with all these Americans leaving, housing will get a bit cheaper, as will everything else. That’s fine with me. It’s all of them coming in in the first place that helped drive prices up.

At this point you have to wonder if Stubbington and MacAskill are having a send-up here–the Americans they quote appear to be uninformed, uninteresting, self-absorbed, and about the whiniest bunch I’ve come across in a long time. Really, who would want these people around? And the article’s end does not disappoint:
Wesbecher isn’t convinced the boom times will return.

The ethos of the ambitious, high-earning American is I will do anything to make money, even if it means moving my family,’ he said. When the performance bonuses go away, the value of being in this country goes away. What a putz. Look, there are plenty of Americans who live here in London, and who wouldn’t dream of living anywhere else. Make it easy on us and go home, please. Soon.

Labels: American exceptionalism

posted by wufnik at 9:29 PM   Nick said…

“uninformed, uninteresting, self-absorbed, and about the whiniest bunch I’ve come across in a long time”

It’s an article for Bloomberg, that’s the target market.

But it doesn’t match up with any of the Americans I know who live over here either, but then they’re not earning stupid amounts in the City, and complaining when everything’s not absolutely perfect – and you know that as soon as they get home, they’ll be telling people how much better everything was in ‘England’. 12:27 AM  wufnik said…

I know–sometimes I want to walk around wearing a “Yankee Go Home” t-shirt, especially in the City.

And not everything will have been better in “England”–they’ll brag about how they never used the NHS, or the tube. 10:45 AM  Expat said…

In many cases, the term expatriate refers to people that do not plan to reside in their new country permanently and normally retain their citizenship for practical purposes. In this strict sense, expatriates differ from immigrants’ who usually plan to reside permanently in a new country and acquire permanent citizenship there. 5:05 PM