Finding War and Peace in London – reflections after shooting London’s grand demonstration for Gaza

“Human-being will always repeat the same mistakes”(“人は同じ過ちを繰り返す”）- Mobile Suits Gundam Z

This is a quote from the famous Japanese animation, Mobile Suit Gundam Z, like any other animation director who experienced WWII, Yoshiyuki Tomino put many of his reflections on Wars in his rich and fruitful animation work. Being a witness of WWII and the anti-war leftwing student movement in Japan, Yoshiyuki’s work embedded his political thoughts about the nature of war in his works which often inspires me in either research or photography.

Near the winter of 2023, another round of war broke out in Gaza and it is still going on as the world steps into the more uncertain 2024. “This must be a great chance to take pictures”, sadly this was not what I was thinking about when hearing the news. As a history student, I was extremely shocked by the insensitivity of the conflict, especially after the first round of retaliation from both sides was done several days before the ground campaign took place. However, the idea of taking some pictures never appeared in my mind until I found the war had extended to the classroom where I was.

The campus protest that I’ve encountered at LSE, shot with Nikon F2 & Kodak Vision2 250D “5205”

The occasion was that one day during my Monday lecture, a colleague of mine appeared in the classroom with a board written with slogans of demonstration for Gaza. I was surprised by how fast the war has extended to my everyday life of mine and the idea of taking some pictures of the conflict appeared in my mind. In my point of view and as all readers can tell from the pictures below, a social-wide demonstration is highly different from a campus one. regardless of the hot-minded character of young college students, a social-wide demonstration to me is more of a complexity of social expressions, including political, emotional and violent ones.

Furthermore, you can tell that in a social-wide demonstration, there is a certain kind of unity among people from different backgrounds. This unity could maximise emotions that were expressed in the demonstration, in fact, my experience during the demonstration echoed this perception from the view of a photographer. People talked to me without any burden and appreciated what I was doing without concern about being put in the viewfinder, I can tell an atmosphere of common understanding among people drove them to do these things without much concern.

The Experience

“Shooting like a war photographer” is the target that I set for myself to fully experience the demonstration as I saw a demonstration like this as a “war without firing a gun or dropping a bomb”. It is a war against the reality of common people and in a peaceful way, so it deserves to be treated like a war. During the second and third grand demonstrations for Palestine in London, I loaded a roll of Fujifilm Acros II to my Nikon F2, a gift from one of my grandfathers who is a camera repairer. Shooting with a Nikon F2 contains a specific meaning, it is the closest camera to the Nikon F I can find among my collections which brings me a sort of “Vietnam War feeling”.

My experience during these two shooting events was quite unpleasant and I felt the real difficulties of those professional war photographers who once had to use all manual while having their lives endangered. First of all, using my DP-1 viewfinder makes it hard to get the value of exposure as the Nikon F2 is such a big camera for my little hand and sometimes my viewfinder stops working so I have to check the top window for the meter reading.

Furthermore, both demonstrations took place during sunny interval days which made the exposure measurement harder. Secondly, focusing on the moving crowd is difficult and I had to keep my pace to ensure that I could cope with the moving crowds. As a result, some pictures ended up under-exposed while some were misfocused. But I still have some promising pictures, and the following pictures are inspiring ones.

The Reflections

Shooting these demonstrations led to my further thinking about how to present a theme of warfare without directly shooting it but shooting events that are heavily related to it. One of my concerns or considerations is the political agenda behind pictures. When shooting on the battlefield, the only theme is to reflect the harm of war with the most humane sympathy to those who were deteriorated by the war. Nevertheless, behind the front line, it is much more complicated, even at these London Grand Demonstrations for Gaza that were initiated by pacifist groups, I could still find different political camps in the demonstration.

This concern led to my caution when firing my shutter as many posters, slogans, flags and pamphlets are overwhelmingly political while my decision of not showing these pictures as the ones is not because I fear that putting these pictures in public may lead to disputes or disappointment of others but for the deviation of my theme which should be purely for wishing the peace to come in our turbulent world.

This issue can be expanded into the discussion on the boundary of photographical expression. Before taking pictures for this specific project, I was quite aware of how politically controversial this topic could become, and I discussed my thoughts with Hamish over the potentially problematic political side of my pictures. He told me that I could feel free as long as not making it too provocative as that might cause quarrels on 35mmc. This raised my thinking on whether a photographer should be constrained by social controversies or not.

Here the concept of social controversies is a broad concept as political opinion could be social controversies. If we take this concept then the answer should be “no”, if one is too concerned about social controversies then their inspirations are constrained as there are too many of these controversies. However, it should be considered to what extent social controversies bring impact on one’s idea endowed in his/her work, for me, I decided to avoid making these controversial pictures as a part of the featured pictures of this project.

The reason to do so is not to let loose of political controversies that might divert my core idea of vowing for peace. But I think it is good to bear in mind that when drafting a project, it is better to be less constrained by social controversies while when taking pictures in the field, it is better to be careful not to let on-going events override the original ideas of the photographer.

Another issue that raised my awareness when shooting in the crowd is selecting the right figure to shoot. It may sound easy as you can literally shoot anyone who agrees to be taken a picture of and this is not what I wish to discuss. What I mean is how to integrate the idea behind the viewfinder (me) into the objective and how to select the most appropriate objective that can deliver my ideas.

This is where shooting the war from different angles differs from one another, taking my pacifist idea as an example, shooting in the warzone is easy to incorporate this idea into frames as you have different ways that vary from revealing the brutality of the war and it seems that everything can be the revelation to the brutality of the war. Nevertheless, as the distance (both physically and mentally) from the warzone grew further, it became harder to make use of the brutality of the war as an illustration of the call for peace.

One critical factor in this sense of distance is the changed motivation, people in the warzone are only motivated by their survival instinct while in a protest that is far away from the warzone, people are motivated by a combination of political allegiance, identification, mass culture and sympathy to the war witnesses. Beyond this divergence in motivation is the expression of emotion which directly determines the picture one can get. In fact, without the intensification of the war, people in the protest can rarely express a similar level of natural and intense expression of their emotion to those war witnesses. By talking to people, I can feel that they might share the sorrow or anger of the war as those who experienced it, but it is hard to capture intense feelings through the picture.

I did not walk away without a solution and kept shooting. I was very inspired by the famous picture of The Afghanistan Girl from McCurry. (Well, I think it’s not something worth saying to be inspired by one of the most famous pictures in human history LOL) The picture revealed the uniqueness of naivety as children often have no idea about complicated ideas and their clean eyes are extremely performative to emotions. This idea of shooting more pictures of kids in the demonstration facilitated some core pictures I shot during the demonstrations as you can tell from their eyes the most complicated emotion that mixed firmness, confusion, sadness and sincere hope for a better future.

Final Thoughts

This shooting project brought me some really deep thinking into how to present war and peace in a place that is far away from the battlefield. Luckily, I did not join the more brutal demonstration in London that took place two weeks after I finished shooting the second demonstration. Thus, I managed to avoid the potential hazard of being beaten up by London police or tasting tear gas and coloured smoke. Still, when the news of the more chaotic demonstration in London was passed back to China, my parents rang my phone in the middle of the night to check if I was there or not. However, what they might not know is that even the most severe hazard that I might face in a demonstration is nowhere near what a war photographer or journalist might face on the battlefield. When I got pictures, I took of these demonstrations for peace, I realised that no matter how hard I was trying to capture the war and peace in London, it is still the illusion of war within a metropolis that has enjoyed peace for a long time. The real warfare in our time is captured by those brave faces who sacrificed their lives for desperate souls in war zones.

Epilogue

By the accomplishment of this article (January 8th 2024), there have been 79 journalist casualties in the ongoing Gaza Conflict, 16 wounded and 3 missing. May the souls of these brave men or women rest in peace.

I hope one day people in Palestine can live like this board wrote “People in Palestine should be left freely on their land to decide their life”

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