At the frontline of protest photography Marc Vallée has seen the police at their worst - currently working on a long-term project to document political protest and dissent in modern Britain, Marc has documented hundreds of protests.  He has also broken major front-page stories for The Guardian on police surveillance of protesters and journalists as well as covert state targeting of the environmental group Plane Stupid. For The Financial Times Marc revealed Scotland Yard’s secret picture database of protesters that had previously had been denied.  He is also one of the co-founders of the group “I’m a Photographer not a Terrorist” – an organisation focusing on terrorism laws and how they impact public photography.

I’ve been a photographer for fifteen years predominantly as a photojournalist documenting youth culture (he started off shooting skaters, surfers and punks in New Jersey in the US in 1995).
 
"I’d always been interested in youth culture and although originally, I wasn’t into protest photography I was keenly political and something clicked during the build up to the [Afghanistan] war.  I started to see the youth culture element to the anti-war protests and this interested me.
 
In 2006, I was covering a protest outside Parliament called Sack Parliament.  It was an anti-war protest – not very large – I’d say about 150 protesters.  There was probably more media than protesters and over 800 police officers out in force.  A small group of protesters went across the road towards Parliament and along with other photographers I followed to document them.

I was violently grabbed by the police along with other photographers and was thrown through a police line and landed on my back.  I was treated at the scene and then taken to hospital by ambulance and couldn’t work for a month.  I sued the police and 18 months or so later we settled out of court, with an apology, a payment and all my legal costs covered.
 
When I was back working I noticed that some police officers were coming up and saying hello to me by name and following and photographing me – once I was even followed to the loo!  It was done in a very threatening way, a kind of “we know who you are” kind of way.  It was like something out of a film.  I started researching the police unit that these officers belonged to.  I found that for the last decade or so the Metropolitan police's Forward Intelligence Teams (FIT) had pioneered a controversial technique of "overt surveillance" that is designed to "record identifiable details" and intelligence of protesters and journalists and in my view it’s was also designed to target and harass.

A year almost to the day from the assault outside Parliament I was back covering a protest outside Parliament and an officer was pushing me away from the street.  I said; “Look, I’m walking where you want me to, I’ve got a bad back, let me walk at the pace I need to walk at”.  He replied; “I know you’ve got a bad back and I know how you got it”.

My gut feeling at the time was that this was happening because I was still suing them – it felt very personal but I also saw the wider political nature of it in a press freedom context and how the state works.

Around the same time I went to my trade union the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) to make a complaint about this kind of targeting - that I and other photographers were getting from the police FIT teams. The NUJ took our complaints to the police, Home Office and ironically to Parliament.
 
While this was going on, I continued my research and realized that I was onto something.  Over two year later I went to the Guardian and I hooked up with Paul Lewis (who later won The Bevins Prize for outstanding investigative journalism for his coverage of the treatment of Ian Tomlinson at the G20 protests).
 
We worked together for three months and it paid off as our story made the front page of the Guardian in March 2009.  Our investigation questioned the legality of police actions – not only who they were photographing and targeting but how they were collecting and storing data.  It’s one thing for a member of the public to photograph you in the street it’s a whole different matter when the state does it – it’s more about what the police do with the pictures then the act of taking the picture.  We had a huge and positive reaction to the story and Paul and I have worked on other investigations together since.  Along side this I have also written about press freedom and photographers’ rights for The Guardian’s Liberty Central. 
 
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To make good sold picture I feel you have to research the subject – to understand what you are documenting, I feel you have to understand the subject or you are in danger of missing the point of documenting it in the first place. I’ve always been a bit of a politics and news geek – so maybe it’s just how I approach the work. 
 
There are two sides to my photography. Firstly, it’s making sure I’ve covered what I’ll sell for news – capturing the more ‘lively’ parts of a protest – and yes that is code for agro.  Secondly and more importantly for me is documenting the youth culture element via portraiture.  In many ways these pictures are quieter and more about the individual and a more positive take on things.  Like the picture of the young man at the Kingsnorth climate camp in 2008 with ‘Eon F off’ written on his chest.  Many newspapers tend to go for ‘action’ picture which on the whole is something I’m not that interested in but like most photographers have to cover.

Young people are incredibly political. They may not be interested in the three main parties, but let’s face it, can we blame them? I’ve covered so many different events where young people are involved and they’re incredibly passionate.  There are young people coming out of schools and colleges today with no place to go.  No university places due funding cuts and no jobs. They’re thinking - what the hell is going on? And questioning how society is run and with that I will end up photographing them on a protest sometime soon.

Marc Vallee was talking to Hattie Hawksworth

Image courtesy of Marc Vallée >>