They are the virus

Trafalgar Square, 29 August 2020

By Paul Clarke Photography

August 30^th, 2020

Why did I go? What did I see? What should I tell?

A march against a pandemic? A gathering to reject...science? A rally protesting at – well, everything, it seemed. A friend mentioned a few weeks ago that this event was happening, and I knew I'd be there. I've missed going to events, sure. I've also had the concerns you'd expect about being in any crowd. But there was something else at play here.

We all think we're rational. I think that's just a fact of human cognition. And we've all got a reasonable idea of what irrational looks like. But what does a LOT of irrational look like? What does a distributed, scattergun level of irrationality look like, spread across a London square on a cold, grey, August day?

I wanted to see, and record, for myself.

The first thing that hits you at any protest is the banners. There to tell you a bit about what the cause is. And to show off humour and inventiveness.

Well.

Now. There's a lot there. A LOT. Take a bit of time and scan through them all. JFK. 9/11. Plandemic. Save Our Children. (JFK?) NESARA & GESARA? (Look them up.) Mr Deeds?? I mean. Ok.

Q. Obviously. Much more of this to be seen. Oh, and POTUS. Well, now there's an interesting thing. In an entire afternoon scanning thousands of people and hundreds of banners, that was the one single reference to the Orange One that I could see.

Literally everybody else in the entire history of business, politics and medicine seemed to be depicted as a hate figure on somebody's banner. But not Trump. That was interesting.

More banners.

A Q! Fear Muzzles! Death Porn! (Slightly miffed I never managed to catch that series.) Soro's the Greengrocer. And ha yes of course, Peadophiles.

STOP.

STOP RIGHT NOW PAUL.

Because yes it would be really easy to laugh at all this. To wave a tertiary-educated palm at these thickies with their cardboard delusions. So I'm not going to do that. I think it would just make an awful situation even worse.

Instead, I want to pick out something that struck me once I stopped ridiculing the signs, and started looking and listening to the people. To the normal people. Because they were really, very normal in lots of ways. Angry, bitter, let-down, but honestly, in comparison to the pro- and anti-Brexit marchers I'd walked with last year, they were far closer to a cross-section of Ordinary Britain than either.

"Nobody speaks for us. Nobody speaks for the poor."

That's from the guy on the left of this picture.

He's right, isn't he? Nobody really does.

The police

One thing that came up a few times in response to these photos was the police mask-wearing policy. This is different from other recent marches where there's been a concerted effort to keep police unmasked – perhaps for better communication, or building rapport with those they are trying to protect. Not here though. Is this a point being made? Are they, as some have suggested, doing a bit of trolling?

The normality

What you see here are normal people.

I know, right? Normal by what standard? But if you were to grab 100 people from a motorway service station (the best melting pot location you'll find in modern Britain) chances are they'd look a lot like this. And perhaps even contain some of these opinions.

You can't just demonise them. Or write them off with pejoratives like "stupid" or "idiot". They are us. Like the frustrated motorist, they're not the traffic, we're all traffic.

I picked on the spelling on one of the signs in my original picture thread on Twitter. I regret this. It's a cheap shot. Greengrocer apostrophe's aren't my version of English. That doesn't mean they're nobody else's.

The phrase "the new normal" appeared on a lot of banners in the square. The irony did not escape me.

And that sparked me thinking about other issues at play here.

Is the anger directed at these people really more to do with their perceived rejection of evidence and science? Are we really cross that someone has an opinion about vaccination per se, or that they aren't doing the legwork they should to get a more solid answer from detailed academic papers?

You have to be really careful with this one. We make judgements based on the best information available to us at the time. And 'available' can't do that much work here. I remember taking two of my kids for separated MMR jabs (at huge expense) because of the FUD surrounding the Wakefield scandal. I now know that it was a scandal with the benefit of hindsight and a far better scicomms network. Back then, I didn't. I was pretty sure that MMR wouldn't do any harm, but if I could buy out even a tiny percentage risk from my own pocket? Well, rational reader, I did.

Or a few months ago – tearfully lining up the kids in a terrified chain gang of shopping-washing. We didn't know very much about fomites, or science. And maybe we still don't know all that much. But we were on our knees doing the scrubbing, fighting off the scary stuff by the only means available to us.

Be careful who you call stupid, or informed, or normal.

Kids

Two pictures in particular thumped me right between the eyes. Both feature children. This is a massively complicated and sensitive area, as everyone knows. The issues of consent and exploitation haunt every photographer who works with people. Or at least they should.

If a child appears in one of my pictures you can be sure I have gone through a thorough process of self-examination and justification. Is the child in danger? Distress? Explicitly identifiable in some way (badge, school uniform etc.)? These are just the obvious ones. When this picture surfaces in 20 years, what then? (The issue of future facial recognition also haunts me.)

The law on photography in public spaces isn't really much help to us here. Just because you can doesn't mean you should. And just because you've thought about it carefully doesn't mean you're insulated from lots of other blowback and criticism.

So if you show images like this, you have to weigh whether the overall benefit of your objective: showing the relentless normality of gatherings like this, outweighs possible harms. As with all balanced judgements, there's no guaranteed right answer.

It's also one of the reasons why I rarely get into the licensing of images for publication. I think that would fundamentally change my relationship with professional photography, and there are many out there doing it very well. Go and license their pictures of Saturday if you need some, there are plenty available. Press photography is better as a full-time activity than weekend hobbyism, in my view. I will enforce rights if my images are used, and vigorously so, but that's about ensuring that photography continues to be seen as having a value.

I have a thriving business in commissioned work, and chewing away at the income of dedicated press photographers for a few quid a picture will only undermine their work in a way that will do harm overall. They're out there at the rainy court snatch in Chelmsford on a November Tuesday, not just at the sexy colourful stuff in central London. Support them.

Vulnerability

We can flow neatly from issues of children in protest photos, to other areas of vulnerability. If someone is displaying beliefs and behaviours that you find indistinguishable from acute mental health distress or other similar conditions, what then? I'm not going to illustrate this paragraph with specific photos. And who are you (very likely not a mental health professional and if you are then not one involved in their specific case or care) to judge anyway? But at what point do you pull the camera away? Let me just say that I do have such a line, at least for myself, and I tried to keep to it at this gathering.

There's so much more to be said. The concern-anger of those who rail against gatherings like this: not, they say, because of the content, but just because of the size and proximity. The machinery that decides what makes the press story. The words we choose – incidentally the title of this post is taken from one of the posters I saw advertising the name of the event. It can all be loaded, and projected, can't it?

The mechanisms that allow concerns and misinformation to bloom into huge communities (yes, I'm talking about you, Facebook). The collapse of trust in any formal leadership. The delight of participating in something. (Go and look up the excellent writing on why QAnon functions as an Alternate Reality Game. Now.)