Exhibitions

I was really please to have photographs included in two exhibitions in London over the summer:

“The Photographers’ Gallery at 50”

Poster and installation stills from “Vulcans Forge” Exhibition in 1979 …. I was particularly thrilled to be on a wall with Colin Jones, one of my favorite photographers.

https://thephotographersgallery.org.uk/whats-on/vulcans-forge-janine-wiedel

REVIEW:

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Photographers Gallery at 50 Exhibition Summer 2021

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The ICA: “War Inna Babylon”

“Ten years on from the UK-wide riots sparked by the police killing of Mark Duggan, this exhibition shines a light on the vast range of collective actions, resistance and grassroots activism undertaken by Black communities across the U.K in response to over seven decades of societal and institutional racism.”

more about the exhibition:

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2021/jun/01/black-experience-of-britain-since-1940s-charted-in-ica-exhibition

Charting Black Resistance in the UK Since the 1940s

Photos taken at the Anti-Apartheid protest in Trafalgar Square 1985

“No to Taliban Rule” Afghans Protest, London 28.08.2021

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Hundreds of Anti-Taliban British Afghans joined a protest through Central London asking for the Western nations to stop their proxy war and to restore peace.The protest began at Marble Arch, stopping at: the BBC, Downing Street, Parliament Square.

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Grenfell Tower Fire Remembered on 3rd Anniversary

On the 14th of June 2017, seventy two people died in the Grenfell Tower disaster.

Three years on there continues to be injustice for many of the families who are yet to be permanently housed.

 

Three years on the unsafe and flammable cladding that was used on Grenfell Tower still remains on thousands of buildings in the UK.

 

The majority of the residents were from the BAME community.

for more: https://archive.wiedel-photo-library.com/gallery/Grenfell-Tower-tears-and-anger/G0000AEdOwHmeCl0/C0000g4SmreJ2a34

https://archive.wiedel-photo-library.com/gallery/Grenfell-Tower-Protest/G0000BEZm7WVKHbE/C0000g4SmreJ2a34

 

Recent Exhibitions – Past work

Forty years on, I’ve been really pleased to have had two different opportunities to exhibit some of my industrial photographs back in their original locations in the West Midlands (UK).

In June, along with John Myers, I had an outdoor exhibition “Black Country Living” which was part of the Blast Festival. My chain-making photos from 1978 were mounted on hoardings and mobile advertising boards in West Bromwich.

 

Currently: My photographs from the Jewellery Quarter taken in 1977 are being shown along with more recent images of the area by Andy Pilsbury and Ines Elsa Dalal at the Iron House Gallery in Birmingham.   Still: Stories from the Jewellery Quarter     open 26th October – 10th November

Returning to the area after 40 years was an amazing experience. Turner and Simpson where I took most of the photographs no longer exists but it is good to see that there are still some craftspeople and workshops continuing to keep traditional skills alive in this historic area.

At both these venues a real ‘blast from the past’ was the showing of the 1978 ATV film about the original project: https://www.macearchive.org/films/camera-streets

Below is Florence Alan who had been with Turner & Simpson for 35 years. She was the holder of a secret gilding formula which she was only going to reveal to her son on her death bed.

Above is Bill Spooner, a silversmith, age 70. He began working in the Jewellery Quarter at age ten.

 

Link to an interview: by Jewellery Quarter Townscape Heritage: https://th.jewelleryquarter.net/behind-the-lense-janine-wiedel/

Townscape Heritage Blog: https://th.jewelleryquarter.net/jq-on-view-janine-wiedel/

 

Books/zines available from Cafe Royal Books:

‘The Jewellery Quarter 1977:  https://www.caferoyalbooks.com/shop/janine-wiedel-jewellery-quarter-birmingham-1977

A box set with 7 individual books of  The West Midlands industries: https://www.caferoyalbooks.com/shop/janine-wiedel-industry-west-midlands-19771979

 

 

Palestinians Protest outside Israeli Embassy 30/3/2019

“Exist, Resist, Return”. A global call for solidarity on Palestinian Land Day: a day which commemorates the unarmed protesters killed by the Israeli police and Defense Force in 1976, during demonstrations against Israel’s expropriation of Palestinian land. This year, March 30th also marked the first anniversary of the start of the Great Return March demonstrations: weekly mobilisations calling for the Right to Return for Palestinian refugees and an end to the twelve-year siege of Gaza. Over one six-week period these demonstrations saw more than 110 unarmed Palestinians killed by the Israeli Defence Forces. The rally on Saturday echoed the demands of the Great Return Marches, in calling for an end to the siege and that the state of Israel acknowledge International Law on the right of return. Speakers also rejected suggestions that criticism of Israel could be seen as ‘antisemitic’.

Behind police barriers a small counter-demonstration, under both Israeli and Brazilian flags, expressed their enduring support for the state of Israel, and their criticism of Hamas.

 

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LINK FOR FULL SET

Brexit: Put it to the People (March 2019)

A million people marched through London on the ‘Peoples Vote’ anti-Brexit protest 23 March 2019

 

 

for more go to: https://bit.ly/2TEF9SF

The Royal Albert Hall and a new Sony camera

I was very pleased to have my photograph win the ‘Historic’ category of The British Life Photography Awards and to have another image “highly commended” .

The exhibition and book were launched this week and will be on view at The Royal Albert Hall until the end of February and then go on tour.

Alan and fellow workers on midday break at Sandy Lane pub in Aston, Birmingham.

I took above in 1978 as part of a two year documentary project on industries in the West Midland. Everyday at midday the drop hammers at Smith’s Forgings stopped and the forge became silent for an hour. All the workers vacated to the pub round the corner. It was the only other building still standing amongst the encroaching urban decline in the shadows of Spaghetti junction.

This second image was taken in at The Gainsborough Silk Weaving Company in Sudbury, West Suffolk in the 1990s.

The sounds and atmosphere transported me back 100 years. The mill was founded in 1903, during the diaspora of overtaxed weavers from the East End of London. Today it’s one of the few remaining commercial silk mills in England and is still using the original Hattersley looms.

Stop the Slave Trade in Libya

Hundreds protested outside the Libyan Embassy, calling for the British Government to put pressure on Libya to end slavery and the inhumane treatment of migrants.

Libya, the main transit point for refugees and migrants trying to reach Europe by sea, is estimated to have tens of thousands currently being held in camps, as well as being detained by people smugglers and armed militia.

Conditions in the centers have been described as “horrific,” and among other abuses, migrants are vulnerable to being sold off as laborers in slave auctions.  As Leonard Doyle (Director of Media and Communications for the IOM in Geneva) said “they become commodities to be bought, sold and discarded when they have no more value,”

The United Security Council expressed grave concern about the recent reports from Tripoli amounting to the “heinous abuses of human rights”.

Whilst slavery has a long history in Libya, the recent CNN footage has sparked worldwide outrage and brought the issue to the forefront in the media as it is considered to be the first hard evidence of 21st-century slave trade in Africa.  Parliament is due to debate the petition on December 18th.  Let’s not allow this abuse to be ignored !!!

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Smith’s Drop Forge 1978: now published

Very pleased to have another book published this month by Cafe Royal Books

These photos were originally part of 2 year project “Vulcan’s Forge” which became an exhibition and book.  In 1978, I was funded by West Midlands Arts to document the industries of the area.

Smiths’ Forgings, in the Aston area of Birmingham, was a typical small firm. It began in 1910 and by the ’70s was producing the majority of ‘male-female couplings’ for British articulated lorries. Most of the workers had been there for their entire working lives and many were from the same family.

The work was tough. Red-hot furnaces heated the raw metal, which was then placed under a 35-hundredweight hammer; a rope released the ratchet, and the hammer dropped about nine feet to stamp the metal into shape. There were nine hammers, the oldest of which was seventy years old, the youngest thirty-five. The noise was deafening. Accidents occurred, but the men had no thought of changing jobs. The hammers were referred to as “Jim’s” or “Bob’s”. They belonged to the men who worked them, a testament to the closeness felt for their company and work. “We do things in the old fashioned way here,” they said with pride, “there are a great many things that only a man over fifty still understands… Any child could work in the modern forges, but we are the real stampers.”

order direct from Cafe Royal Books

(or )     For a £10 signed copy email: wiedelphoto@googlemail.com

(Please note: All photographs on this site are copyrighted and must not be copied in any form without permission)

NEW BOOK: ‘Black Power / Black Panthers’ 1969

Very pleased that Cafe Royal Books has published my book/Zine: ‘Black Power / Black Panthers’. It’s now available from:

Cafe Royal Books

 

Malcolm X and Martin Luther King had been assassinated and Black radicalism had taken over from the non-violent Civil Rights Movement. America’s urban black population were faced by rising unemployment, disintegrating public services, pervasive and systematic racism and police brutality. They decided to fight back: we shall overcome ” became “we shall overrun”.

Kathleen Cleaver with Peco (on her right) and Emory Douglas, minister of culture (on her right). Black Panther Rally, Oakland California 1969

Protest to free Huey Newton from prison.

 

 

for a  £10 signed copy email: wiedelphoto@googlemail.com

Grenfell Tower Disaster: tears and anger

Dami lives locally and knew many of those missing/dead

Wall of condolence.  The death toll is now officially at 79 but will no doubt rise to three figures.

Maria Mendy is the cousin of Mary Mendy.  Mary and her daughter Khadya Saye, a talented artist, were both killed the fire.

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REFUGEE WEEK: “IN TRANSIT” exhibition

On now at Gallery 101: The International Salvation Army Headquarters

photographs by Jacky Chapman and myself

With both the Calais Jungle and the Grande Synthe camp now razed to the ground, the 10,000 plus refugees/migrants have been disperse across France. Without the support and communal infrastructure they had managed to build in the camps they now face an even more precarious and vulnerable future.

Hopefully our photographs will provide a lasting record of the ingenuity and humanity of those who having been forced to leave their homelands in order to find a place of safety, were able to form an alternative community and an environment that could help them survive with some dignity (including places of worship, shops, and schools).

All this now destroyed!

…”In Transit’s considerable power emerges through the effective interweaving of multiple dimensions. From the general to the intimate, from the distant to the near and from the graphic to the human, the photographs offer a carefully balanced range of perspectives. In so doing they build towards a sensitive, and much needed, recovery of a time and place whose memory, and one-time residents, now seem vulnerable to multiple modes of disappearance. This recovery eschews both nostalgia for and dismissal of what has been lost. The squalor and implied violence of the camps are here, but theirs is the sotto voice. The emphasis instead falls upon glimpses of lives carried on through adversity. In this sense the exhibition seems underwritten by the motto which one photograph shows written on the wall a young man from Darfur’s room: ‘never give up’…  review by Erica Zimmermann  in Photomonitor

Yemeni Bodegas Close down, NYC

Over a thousand Yemeni-Americans closed down their bodegas (24 hr grocery stores) in protest against Donald Trump’s executive order banning US entry to travelers from Yemen and six other predominantly Muslim countries. Around 5,000 supporters gathered at Borough House in Brooklyn (New York City)  to show their patriotism to the USA and their anger at the immigration ban. The “shut down” aimed to demonstration to the public the important contribution the Yemeni community makes to the economic and social fabric of the city.

At 5.30 as the sun set, the crowd fell silent and hundreds lined up for prayer.

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Mass Deportation Charter flights

Every week UK charter flights carrying deportees and guards depart for Nigeria, Ghana, Jamaica, Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Movement for Justice marched through Brixton protesting the targeting of long-established African, Asian and Caribbean communities in Britain – dividing families and deporting people who have built lives in the UK, who have parents, partners and children here, people who have lived most of their lives in Britain, students who have not finished their courses, those who have sought asylum and protection, people with serious health problems and others who are long-term carers to elderly and disabled relatives.

The targeting of so many people who are integrated members of their communities and wider society is a divisive act of racist discrimination.

In 2013, Corporate Watch published a research report titled “Collective Expulsion: the case against mass deportation charter flights”.

Today, not much has changed:

“The UK continues to make political deportation deals with governments of its former colonies and war zones. Almost 2,000 people a year are still loaded onto secretive night flights from Stansted airport, handcuffed by private security ‘escorts’, in one of the most brutal facets of the detention and deportation regime…….. https://corporatewatch.org/news/2017/jan/06/deportation-charter-flights-collective-expulsion-2017

Syrians rage against inaction in Aleppo

“Community is with you”

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Standing up Against Racism and Fascism

 

Thousands marched through central London on United Nations International Anti–Racism Day. The day of action was inaugurated following the Sharpeville Massacre in South Africa when the police brutally opened fire on a peaceful anti-apartheid protest killing 69 people and wounding 178.

The main aims are to promote diversity and to stand up to racism. In Britain and across Europe there has been a right wing political and media led increase in Islamophobia and a scapegoating of minorities including the immigrant, Roma, Black and Asian communities.

The Day also commemorated the death of Nelson Mandela

“I have fought against white domination and I have fought against black domination. I’ve cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.”

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NEVER FORGET: Sikh Temple Massacre of 1984

Fifteen thousand Sikhs from all over the UK joined together in London on Sunday to remember the 1984 massacre in the Amritsar Golden Temple in Punjab and to call for the formation of an independent Sikh state of Khalistan.

In 1984 there was growing tension between the government of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and the Sikhs in the northern state of Punjab. The Sikhs felt discriminated against by the Hindu majority. On 6th June, the Indian army attacked the Golden Temple with heavy artillery and tanks. This was timed to coincide with an important Sikh celebration and thousands of pilgrims were inside the Temple complex.

The storming of the Sikhs’ holiest shrine started months of attacks and retaliations which left thousands dead and many more thousands homeless. Eventually this ended with Indira Gandhi being assassinated by two of her Sikh bodyguards.

Last Sunday there was a dignified march through central London led by five High Priests with ceremonial swords. It ended with a rally on the Victoria embankment where there were many moving and powerful speeches asking the Indian government to accept accountability for the massacre, and calling for the Sikhs’ right to self-determination in their own home state, Khalistan.

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