Film, Forest Washing and Vogue Italia

The first video for All Quiet on the Home Front here on the ICVL Studio website. It's a quite beautiful thing.

The second one is going out on the Vogue Italia website today with a slideshow of images and it is also a quite beautiful thing. The places featured in the films are a BMX track by the River Avon in Bath, Solsbury Hill (here's the song - it's the same place) and Brown's Folly.

The filming was done by Sam Hardie with editing by Alejandro Acin. The filming was all done handheld on a Sony and is absolutely beautiful. It's 50mm 1.4 wide open dreamy and nostalgic and when I first saw the film I was transported into this strange dreamland somewhere between the past and the present.

Isabel's voice accentuates that dreaminess. I remember watching it and thinking 'well, it's beautiful, but maybe it's too beautiful. How does it connect to the book'.

But then I looked again and saw what Sam had been filming all the way through; the light flickering through the trees, the shade of leaves dappled against Isabel's skin. Sam filmed through trees, through shrubs, through the flowers of the invasive species that fill the land surrounding the BMX track.

The beauty isn't coming from the actual places. All of the places we filmed, all of the places in the book are of a type. They are not pastoral landscapes, they are not wilderness landscapes, they are not sublime landscapes, they are completely beat-up post-industrial/post-agricultural landscapes.

But they are outside and there are trees, flowers, leaves and the sights and smells of vegetation growing from the land. There's the smell of the earth, there's the touch of the wind, there's the sense of being in nature, however messy it might be. And it is messy.

The Japanese have this idea of 'forest-bathing' - shinrin-yoku. It's the idea that you go to the forest to bathe your senses in the sights, the sounds, the smells, the touch - and even the taste - and that reduces stress, develops your immune system and does all kinds of other things. Because just as you smell and taste the diesel on your tongue when you're in the city, so you smell and taste the resin, the pollen, the dust when you're in the forest. But where urban particulates kill, arboreal particulates make you flourish. It's the same if you work on a garden or allotment - it boosts your immune system, lowers your heart rate and makes you a better person all round.

Forest-bathing is an antidote to being indoors. It is also calming, it's meditative, it relaxes you. By being outside where there is flora, your brain is taken down a couple of notches. When you're inside your mind is always occupied, not just by the drudgery of everyday existence, but also visually by the grids that dominate our domestic interiors. Everything is more or less ordered. There are straight lines, there are diagonals, there are angles, there are frames. It's the same when we look at a screen - everything is ordered. This ordering means our eyes never get a rest. They are always on the look out for regular patterns and because that is all you have inside, the eyes never stop. And because the eyes never stop, the brain never stops.

Go outside and look at a tree and the picture changes. The shifting leaves are a mass of information, a continually changing pattern of light and shade, of geometric patterns that never quite form a clearly defined shape. It's too much information for the visual cortex to handle, so instead of keeping on working, it simply stops. It's visual overload. It shuts down and then you can rest.

It's also something universal. I remember going to Westonbirt Arboretum with a group of Somali students. It was one of the most touching moments when they all suddenly started looking around what I thought was this incredibly English garden with a sense of joyful nostalgia. The sense of elation combined with calmness was palpable. They all had a nostalgia for the landscapes they grew up in or visited at the weekend. It was a kind of muscle memory of relaxation and it reminded them of home, which was something I found touching but also surprising and revealing of my ignorance.

They were so used to living in the heart of the city and not getting out too much that by the time they got to Westonbirt, to countryside, they were quite overwhelmed. Not by the sight, but by the feeling. Westonbirt reminded them of home! It was something they remembered and something they deserved.

Earlier in the week I wrote about Mathieu Asselin and his book Monsanto. He talked about it at the symposium on photography, politics and change at Gazebook Sicily. He said there is no place for ambiguity in the current political climate, or maybe in any political climate. I'm with him on that. Because I talked about All Quiet on the Home Front at the symposium, and how the personal message can convey something political. I also said that I didn't think that photography could effect change, or not All Quiet on the Home Front.

But maybe I was too hasty. Isabel grew up with these amazing environments on her doorstep and they are what helped make her what she is today. But doesn't everyone deserve the same chance. Shouldn't the essential nature of open, green spaces be recognised for the benefits it provides, shouldn't the cleansing powers of trees and shrubs be available to everybody. For my former students it's not available. Landscape is power after all and in Bristol where they live, in the UK as a whole, the talk is not of providing more green spaces, but of cutting back on green spaces, of removing trees, of making the urban environment even more barren and hostile, because caring for trees, creating a natural environment costs money. And that, with no hint of ambiguity whatsoever, is wrong!

Buy the Subscriber's Edition of All Quiet on the Home Front here.

Buy the Regular Edition of All Quiet on the Home Front here.

The Everyday Landscape: Which we See, Hear, Feel and Taste

From The Cave Mouth and The Giant Voice by Rupert Cox and Angus Carlyle (from a project on WW11 Hiding Places in Okinawa)

Music, Words and Landscape: Limits of the Visual at the SouthBank Club, Bristol

November 7th: 12:00 - 19:30 tbc  
Buy Tickets here

I am sitting in my allotment in Bath. There is a gap in the trees through which I get a perfect view of Solsbury Hill. All around the birds are singing, robins, blackbirds and green finches today. The sweet smell of rotting grass cuttings mixes with that of the dirt on my fingers and the scent of old mint I've just ripped out of the ground.

I pick a raspberry and its tang combines with the taste traces of soil and late summer cosmos pollen that lines my mouth. It's a pleasant cocktail. 

To the east, I see the A46, to the south the TV tower on Claverton Down rising above the River Avon and Brunel's Great Western Railway. 

It's a perfect spot from which to take in the view, but it's more than a view; it's a total sensory experience of a landscape that at first sight seems merely pastoral. But it goes beyond that. Mixed in with the visual beauty, there are sights, sounds, histories, emotions, textures, and tastes. Sit there long enough and still enough and it will envelop me. It's not an outside thing,

Here landscape is melded with body and soul, with collective history. It's not something cold and distant, it's something we are part of; not in a mystical, sublime way, but in a very basic human way where we live and breathe, without being aware of it, the world around us. It's everyday landscape.

This totality of landscape, and the way it is represented in contemporary photography, is the broad focus of a day of talks organised by Max Houghton and I for Saturday November 7th at the Southbank in Bristol. The day is the first in a series of exhibitions and publications that we are planning based around the idea of representation of the living landscape; that it is not just how we see the world around us, but how we sense it on every level. 

Why does it matter? Forty years ago, the New Topographics moved landscape on from the pastoral. Landscapes became something built on and inhabited and very grey. This is the next step forward; landscapes are built on, inhabited and experienced. We see them, we feel them, we hear them, and for the last 50 years at least (think Richard Long here for example) people have been making art that represents this. 

Aren't we above all this sense and emotion nonsense? I wonder about this as I sit looking over Solsbury Hill, taking in the sights, the sounds, the tastes, the touch. How would it be if it were different, if the birds stopped singing, the trees stopped rustling? What if  total silence reigned?

A couple of years back, there was a feature on journalist who went in search of the most silent place in the world. He found in Orfield Laboratories in Minnesota. This is what he said: 

'I became aware of the sound of my breathing, so I held my breath. The dull thump of my heartbeat became apparent – nothing I could do about that. As the minutes ticked by, I started to hear the blood rushing in my veins. Your ears become more sensitive as a place gets quieter, and mine were going overtime. I frowned and heard my scalp moving over my skull, which was eerie, and a strange, metallic scraping noise I couldn't explain. Was I hallucinating? The feeling of peace was spoiled by a tinge of disappointment – this place wasn't quiet at all. You'd have to be dead for absolute silence.'


He ended up enjoying the silence, but he was the exception. Most lasted barely ten minutes. Silence is unnerving, and unnatural.

Sound and landscape, what happens when there is silence, what happens when sound intrudes, are at the heart of the work of Angus Carlyle. He will talk about sound and landscape, and how the one affects our experience of the other, how sound cuts through time, how sound creates pressure, how sound ties to emotion, memory and landscape. 

To get an idea of what he does, seee a clip from his Air Pressure here, a project which records the sound experiences of  '...the last farming family living within the concrete and steel infrastructure of Japan's largest airport, where noise - of taxiing and of take-offs and landings - exerts a constant pressure from before dawn until well after dusk.'



Music, Words and Landscape: Limits of the Visual at the SouthBank Club, Bristol

November 7th: 12:00 - 19:30 tbc

Buy Tickets here

It's a  day of talks and screenings looking at how landscape, words, music and sound connect us to ourselves and the places we photograph. Speakers include Beth and Thom Atkinson, Angus Carlyle, Susan Derges, Paul Gaffney, Max Houghton, Jem Southam, and Ester Vonplon.

Slow TV: Bath, Canals and Psycho-Biography

There was  a two hour show called All Aboard! The Canal Trip on British TV last week. It involved sticking a camera on the front of a canal boat and following the route up the Bath end of the Kennet and Avon Canal.

It was a strange thing to watch because for the last 14 years I've been up and down that canal following the route the canal boat takes from the lock at Bathwick Basin up to the Dundas Aqueduct.

But even though I've been up and down it so many times, I still found it strangely compelling viewing and enjoyed living at second hand the spots that signified so much of my life in Bath and my life as a father.

The canal cut a trail through the outdoor places I used to visit (and still visit) with my family. The trip started from Bathwick Basin and cut through Sydney Gardens, it went past Grosvenor Bridge and over the repurposed land (see top picture) between the river and canal, with Solsbury Hill and Brown's Folly in the background, then continued over the fields by the River Avon, past Warleigh Weir to end up on Dundas Aqueduct, just up the road from the Angel Fish, the canal side cafe we sometimes cycle to for breakfast or a cake.

As we watched, the show became a mix of geography and biography (maybe it was psycho-biography?) with the route traced by the canal a mapping of our recent history. On this canal trip we saw all the places where we had been, where we had enjoyed, not things that had happened or things we had done, but the simple pleasure of being in a place of beauty and calm where the canal slips into the undulating lie of the land.

It was slow TV on a slow boat in a slow place with only the sound of the birds and the lapping of the water as accompaniment (the sound of the engine was edited out). But it was shown on TV, which is somehow antithetical to slowness. It adds a frisson of excitement to things. Seeing something that you experience on a daily basis on TV is somehow dramatic no matter how everyday it is. You watch the boat sailing down the canal and go, oh look, that's the bridge we walk under when we go to Sydney Gardens, or Ohhh, that's by the field where the rabbits used to be or Why, that's where we used to pick blackberries, or that's the path down to the bridge where the mural of the guy who got killed in the drug deal was painted.

But it's on the tv so it's second-hand and it looks different. It's like living your life at a distance, a televised distance where the peace and the quiet and the beauty of the place are dramatised through the camera. You're looking at a location rather than living an experience. It's a very beautiful location though, but I couldn't help but the resonance came from the places the canal touched upon as the boat wended its way through the Avon Valley. It was a mapping then, of places, of memories, or movement.

The show was part of a series of 'Slow TV', so is fit into the whole 'slow' movement - slow cities, slow food, and slow travel. If you google it, slow consultancy comes up rather a lot - which might be revealing of the gap between the rhetoric of slowness and its commercial manifestations.

But yes, it was slow, and it got 600,000 viewers who watched it for probably the same reasons we did, to see what something looked like when shown on TV.

And slow photography? Well, that's always been around....

McCoy Wynne's Triangulation

I love maps and I love photography, so when you get a mapping project such as McCoy Wynne's (made up of Stephanie Wynne and Stephen McCoy)Triangulation, I know I'm on to a winner - especially when the project is so rigorous and ambitious in its outlay.

For Triangulation, McCoy Wynne are going to photographically map the triangulation points used to map the UK. It's a simple idea and one that resonates geographically - I can see the trig point on Solsbury Hill from my house - a place that my daughter always climbs and jumps off when we walk up there (like this... complete with light leak).

I saw McCoy Wynne's pictures online and then met Stephen McCoy at Liverpool Look 13 so I decided to ask the partnership a few questions - which they answered.

What is a triangulation point?

Triangulation points are concrete pillars built as a base for measuring theodolites and referencing lights. We are concentrating on the 314 "primary" triangulation points built between 1936 and 1962 by the Ordnance Survey for the "Retriangulation of Great Britain". Over 6,000 secondary triangulation points also exist.

Many people mistakenly think the function of the triangulation (trig) point is to mark the highest point of hills, but the trig points are placed in positions where at least two other points can be seen in order to form triangles for accurate measurement. An accurate base line was established ( a story in itself) and from this a system of triangles enabled surveyors to make very precise measurements of distance - essential to map making. 

The realisation that accurate maps were necessary coincided with the Enlightenment in the early 18th century - the move away from religion towards scientific method and measurement (Age of Reason) - and a recognition that error-free maps gave advantages to the user, whether they be the military, trade and the transport infra-structure, or road builders.

When did you get the idea for the project?  

We intend to photograph all 314 primary triangulation points from the Shetland Isles in the furthest North-Easterly reaches of Britain to the Scilly Isles in the south-west.

We have been interested in representations of the landscape for many years and have produced sets of work that deal with different aspects of interactions of people and the land. We began to think about mapping and the relation of abstract map view with the reality of terrain. The trig points were an obvious landmark, but we didn't want to just produce another typology collection of these pillars. We decided to use the trig point as a base for the camera and we placed the camera and tripod on top of the trig point. We formulated the idea around the same time as we started the project - about 3 years ago. 

Although we did try other options ( eg: photographing the cardinal points of the compass), we decided that 360 degree panorama was the most valid response to the visual experience of reaching the trig point.

Why is it an interesting project?

The viewpoint is predetermined by the position of the trig point and this reduces the aesthetic decision-making. Notions of what makes a good photograph, which are heavily effected by cultural and educational background, and compositional choices, are reduced. The viewpoint is not randomly chosen but was essential in the mapping of Great Britain.

The method allows us to move away from pictorial or romantic representations of the landscape into more descriptive typology. However, by combining the view of the trig point with the 360 degree panorama taken from the trig point, the visual significance is enhanced. 

The work will provide a comprehensive survey of the British landscape and deals with representations of the landscape, the layering of history, land use, ownership and boundaries.  

The project deals with aspects of mapping and even though the locations of the pillars is well documented, there is still a heightened sense of exploration and anticipation based on the uncertainty of access, weather conditions and the disparity between “the real” and the “abstract” of the map view. The final image is a further abstraction, creating a linear, ribbon like, prospect. The linear characteristic of the image relates to different map projections. We are all familiar with the aerial map of the Ordnance Survey, but some earlier maps are linear and based on routes and track ways, such as the Roman ‘itinerarium’, that shows the Roman road network from Europe to India as a single ribbon.

The work in the exhibition is a selection from those 30 trig points we have photographed so far, but we feel the effect of the work will grow as more trig points are photographed. The power of the work depends on how the varied landscape is unified by being portrayed as a series of strips.

The display of the work will also provide interest because we intend to display the photographs region by region in a relevant venue.

Techniques of mapping improved as technology improved. The majority of the pillars are no longer used in mapping, having been superseded by GPS, but those that can be accessed have become totemic as markers in the landscape. Many people use them as a target for their walk, as ‘touchstones’ on reaching their goal.

Photography is also linked to technology and we have fully embraced digital technology in the production of this work.

How long is the project going to continue?

We have to balance earning a living from our commercial photography practise with this personal project, so although we would like to instigate a more systematic procedure this will be difficult without any financial support. Therefore, we are not imposing any time constraints on the project. We will continue until we have finished even if it takes ten years to complete. Unfortunately the trig points are no longer maintained and some may disappear in the near future.

What are the challenges?

Time, money, travel, weather, access, sore knees. All technical problems have been solved. Fortunately, not all trig points are in remote places and long walks can be offset by some trig points being within a 100 yds of a car park. 

What does the project say about the UK

In one sense it is for other people to decide what it says about the UK, but ...Although we are perceived to be an overcrowded island we have been struck by the lack of people when we are out on the hills of Britain. However, these areas show evidence of the use of land by people over centuries, the layering of history. Often  the hills were used  as forts, lookouts, beacons etc. Modern water towers and communication masts have sometimes overlaid these historical uses. The hilltops use for surveillance, survey and measurement of the land, places them as integral to the structure of land ownership and control.

It also says something about the systematic nature of applied science existing in Britain at the start of the mapping of the country. Our current 'applied science' of satellite technology has and continues to extend survey and surveillance.

There is also an exhibition of some of the Triangulation pictures on show at The Cornerstones Gallery, Liverpool Hope University, Creative Campus, 17 Shaw Street, L6 1HP, from 7th June until 29th September 2013 as part of Look13 Photographic Festival. Two other photographers, Kevin Casey and Stephen King will also be exhibiting and the photographers are collaborating with three writers.

McCoy Wynne have been working with writer and journalist Kenn Taylor http://kenntaylor.wordpress.com/, his written piece will be displayed alongside their work.

The Cold Snap on Solsbury Hill

The cold continues and Christmas is coming. I love this picture of Isabel and Bailey gallivanting about in the frost on Solsbury Hill. 

Speaking of Solsbury Hill, I really like Adrian Arbib's book of the same name. It reminds me of the road protests of years back. And thank you to all the good British student protestors and Uncut demonstrators out there - your actions mean we end the year with at least some hope whatever Clegg, Cameron and all of the other Jeremy Hunts vote for today. It almost doesn't matter what they vote for, watching Clegg's face visibly age as he makes his long march towards the Conservative Party, the Tory backbenches and deselection at the next election makes the short-term pain almost worthwhile - and it makes watching the TV so much more interactive. Never before has shouting Wanker at the TV (Lickspittle before the watershed) been so satisfying or seemed so full of wit - well, not since the 80s at least. .  

Now, altogether now, Climbing Up on Solsbury Hill....

Lily

More random work from the summer - Lily all Dressed Up.

Adrian Arbib on Solsbury Hill and Thought Crime

"I guess I've always been interested in it since I was 16 when I was given a Nikkormat by my grandfather. A wonderful piece of solid machinery that was as much a mark of being a 'grown up' as anything else.

I did a Foundation Course in Art and the camera was always there. As I became more politically aware I realised how powerful ' the image' was and rather grandiosely set about trying to use it for social change. It was at that point I decided to go to the London College of printing (LCP) to do the BA course in film and photography.

To be honest it wasn't really that helpful for me and at that time the Inner London Education authority was being savagely cut back by by the government. Marxist based courses like the one at LCP were particularly affected.

I left the course after two years and went to work as an assistant for a London advertising photographer, a New Zealander called Russell Falkingham. Russell was a great teacher.

I also worked as a freelance assistant for a bit. Plus I also worked as an R type colour printer for a London lab called Presentation Colour in Hatton Garden. I then went travelling with my Nikkormat. I backpacked my way through Africa and when I got back I took a selection of pictures to Tony Stone (now Getty Images ) who immediately started selling my images and sending me cheques for the sales - there's nothing like that for encouraging a young aspiring photographer. I fear that sort of climate, sadly, doesn't exist these days .

I have known the Guardian columnist George Monbiot ever since I was a teenager and we used to plot together about how we would change the world for the better. How mad is that ?

He'd been working for the BBC wildlife unit in Bristol and getting a bit frustrated with things. He rang me up one day and said would I'd like to do an investigative travel book with him in a remote province in Indonesia called West Papua. The publishers needed pictures and would pay our expenses. I jumped at the chance.

I returned after a gruelling but inspiring year of traveling . The pictures were published in a book called Poisoned Arrows and in the UK broadsheets and in Holland and Germany.

I then worked with George again in Kenya a couple of years later on a book called "No Man's land' about about how the traditional herders were losing their land at the hands of agencies like the World Bank. Again this was more work centring on the environment.

I also worked and wrote a story on the San bushmen in Namibia ( working for Christian aid and Associated Press during the 1989 elections there). A bit later I worked for Christian aid and Reuters in Sudan. Nearly all the stories had an environment connection.

So when I returned to the UK in 1993 the road protest movement had just started and it was about the most interesting thing happening in this country at the time.

( Over the years the majority of my work has been with aid agencies on issue based worked - so I suppose that work could be called "environmental" - in fact for clarification it could be said that for environmental photography read social documentary. It's a pretty fine line between the two.)

I then got involved with the Solsbury Hill road protest. I think my pictures might have been the first in the national press on Solsbury Hill . Twyford Down had happened just before it and I guess the news media were quite excited to have a new "issue" to report on.

It was the most interesting thing going on at the time in the UK. Having seen all the chaos in Africa and Indonesia largely due to global capital investments asset-stripping countries in the guise of development - or " globalisation" as it later came to be coined, it was refreshing to see a group of people on the protest sites who appeared to know what was going on. And were at least doing something about it.

I guess I'm sounding a bit partial here. It should be made clear that the level of mistrust of the press by the protesters was quite a significant hurdle to get over. I had rocks thrown at me at Twyford Down.

The truth be told it's taken me 15 years ( the time since I took the pictures) to achieve a level of trust that makes me feel comfortable to actually publish them in book.

I don't remember the police being that involved. It was generally the private security that were the ever present force and the ones that did the removing of protesters from the site, often violently.

The police generally cared not to get involved, even when someone was injured.

It was the protesters and security guards that didn't want their pictures taken. Of course when things became heated people didn't care about having their pictures taken so quite a few of my images are from the thick of it eg a protester being dragged off site.

I always think the quieter moments make the better pictures - but that's often when people say " don't take my picture". I guess I became pretty obsessed with getting the story so I spent probably in the region of three months on and off site . Living up the trees and on the ground I became a more familiar face and consequently was trusted more by the protesters. I hope that is reflected in the images.

I suppose I am still involved in environmental photography, but more by accident than anything else.

I worked as La Repubblica's photographic correspondent in London for over six years trying to get away from protest because it was making me physically ill with all the stress .

Not just the stress of the actual actions but the stress of selling the pictures and getting the stories into the media. A media that was becoming more and more celebrity orientated by the day.

However when I moved to Oxford I did a story for the Guardian and the Daily Telegraph on a community canal boatyard that was being sold off by British waterways to to be turned into luxury investment properties.

And then I got very involved in the campaign to save it (www.jcby.co.uk). That was six years ago and I'm still at it. We've been through and won 2 planning inquiries and now were are hoping to buy it back for the community.

Also I was covering a local story for the Guardian and BBC wildlife on Radley Lakes where N Power were filling much loved wildlife lakes with waste fuel ash from their power station at Didcot . Masked security guards and lawyers issued me with an injunction to stop me taking pictures. This was subsequently taken up by the NUJ and I ended up on Channel 4 News

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mdOFRaDXd2g

Yes things have changed. It's all got very Orwellian these days and security is one of the largest growth industries that we have in the UK.

They film everything and we're not allowed to take pictures anymore. Police are obsessed with evidence gathering. You go to any demo these days and the police are filming everything. And one wonders when they get the time to look at it all.

The recent demos at the G20 in London were responded to with incredible force once the media had left. The police stood by as the RBS bank was smashed up, I'm sure this was allowed to justify a violent response later.

This was all within weeks of the report on policing and protest from the Government select committee on Human rights. It was a flagrant and arrogant dismissal of its findings ( which in themselves were pretty weak) .

The key environmental issue in the UK at the moment is climate change. As we all know world leaders consider this to be the greatest threat to mankind yet those who protest against government inaction are being locked up as criminals.

I understand that currently the trend is for arresting people for "conspiracy to commit" a demonstration. i.e. thought crime.

The mere thought of an "action at a coal-fired power station" is enough to have you locked up overnight and possibly /probably face a custodial sentence. The argument that you are doing it to stop a greater crime no longer cuts any ice in the courts... and of course if you were a photographer covering this you would also be arrested and have your camera equipment confiscated."

But it's not all "climate change" there's also been an ongoing sustained undermining of our communities for profit at the hands of a broken and corrupt planning system ie loss of pubs , loss of shops, loss of community space . Anyone who stands up against this is seen as a domestic extremist.

Things are changing now that that economic model has faltered. The political parties are talking about "communities" now. Perhaps it's just talk but it's certainly our job to make sure that they stick to their promises.

Solsbury Hill by Adrian Arbib

I wandered into Toppings Bookshop in Bath and was delighted to find the excellent Solsbury Hill by Adrian Arbib in the window.

The book documents the protests that met the building of the A46 Bathampton bypass, aka The Road to Nowhere, the treehouses that were made in the, er, trees, the Solsbury Hill benders and the protest camps on Bathampton Water Meadows.

I didn't live in Bath at the time, but I do now and see Solsbury Hill and the meadows every day, and drive along the pointless bypass to get to Brown's Folly, home to the world's second oldest bat and where I make many of my pictures.

Sadly, Arbib's pictures are still relevant as another pointless project is being proposed which will further destroy the Bathampton Water Meadows - a Park and Ride scheme. You can see some of the arguments on why it's such a bad idea by clicking on the links on the Solsbury Hill blog. I think subsidised, nay free public transport that is taken out of the hands of First Great Western, a company that makes public transport a luxury that is more expensive than taxis, is part of the answer.

You can buy the book here, view ephemera from the protest and link up to Arbib's blog, which hopefully will develop with time.