Re-photo

Wandsworth is just along the Thames from Battersea, where Britain’s finest painter, J M W Turner spent a great deal of time in his later years painting the skies from a small room above the porch of St Mary’s church, as I mentioned in an earlier post.  That church, a mile away, is just visible in centre of the full-size version of the image above, though impossible to see in the reduced image.

Years ago, Turner would get a mentioned in my lessons about landscape photography, and I used some of this material in a piece I wrote about the Turner prize on show at Tate Britain a mile or two further downstream.

‘John Mallord William Turner (1775-1851) was the son of a London barber. His mother died in his infancy and he was brought up by his father, who taught him to read but little else. Turner early showed a gift for art and at the age of 15 was admitted to the Royal Academy school; within a year he had a painting accepted for their exhibition. As well as his fine work in oils, Turner was the master of the watercolour sketch and is often considered the father of watercolour painting.

Landscape photographers can learn much from a study of Turner’s work – and that of his contemporary, John Constable (1776-1837), in particular for the close attention both paid to the weather and clouds in their work. Constable started to paint great landscapes with clouds in his native Suffolk and continued after he moved to London. Turner recalled that, ‘as a boy, I used to lie for hours on my back watching the skies, and then go home and paint them; and there was a stall in Soho Bazaar where they sold drawing materials, and they used to buy my skies. They gave me 1s6d for the small ones and 3s6d for the larger ones.’

This was an age of great interest in natural phenomena, and at the very time that Turner was on his back gazing into the heavens, scientists were also making their observations. In France, Jean Baptiste Lamarck proposed the first classification of clouds in 1801, but it was nearer to hand in east London that the Quaker factory owner Luke Howard took time from chemical manufacture to make the detailed daily studies. Larmarck’s proposals sank without trace, but Howard’s ‘cumulus’, ‘stratus’ and ‘cirrus’ presented in his 1802 paper ‘On the Modification of Clouds’ form the basis of our current system of classification. It is a subject that should be dear to the heart of all landscape photographers.

Turner first read Howard’s work almost 20 years later and was inspired by it to paint a fine series of cloud studies. Turner was – even by photographic standards – a prolific worker, and at his death left some 19,000 works to the British Nation. These works form one of the basic collections of the Tate Gallery – now called ‘Tate Britain’ – in London, which houses the largest collection of his paintings, drawings and watercolours, many on display and some reproduced in the on-line catalogue.’

Battersea started on the road to gentrification years ago, and large stretches of its main streets are now solely occupied by estate agents, profiting excessively from what appears to be the UK’s only growth industry, the rise in house prices.  Battersea has more of a cachet than Wandsworth, which used to be largely industrial, with gas works, brewery and more and is spreading rather so far as the property descriptions are concerned. So while the flats at the top of this post are in Wandsworth (and for almost six months the site of the Pure Genius ‘Wandsworth Eco Village‘) they are ‘Battersea Reach’.  The gas works and brewery and its Shire horses at the centre of Wandsworth are now in the past, but there is still some industry, with sand and gravel from the estuary being loaded onto lorries and London’s rubbish being taken on barges in the opposite direction from a large riverside waste-transfer station. Though it must surely be only a matter of time before all these are replaces by investment flats for the Chinese and Arab oil money.

I was there to take photographs, but also and appropriately to show the area to a friend of mine who is a fine watercolourist, though today she was only making sketches. Even so it gave me plenty of time to reflect on the scenes and the fine clouds.  When you images cover a horizontal angle of 146 degrees and the sky is often almost half the image, you really need a few clouds. Clear blue skies are boring and also something of a photographic problem, as the differences in intensity over that wide sweep can be extreme. It’s possible of course to ‘dodge’ and ‘burn’ – or at least their digital equivalents – to even things out a little, but pretty tricky to do so entirely evenly and without any obvious tonal steps.

I’m still not entirely sure about the projection to use for these images, but think I have standardised on that in use here, though I may decide to work to a more panoramic format, though at around 1.57:1 these fit rather well on a wide-angle screen (the one I use is 1.6:1).

The sun was just outside the top left corner of this image, and in some others was actually inside the frame. Although the Nikon 16mm is remarkably resistant to flare, there was a little which required some corrective work. As well as burning in the sky and the clouds, the railings along the top of the waste-transfer station needed some attention, with an increase in contrast and saturation along with a decrease in exposure to make the flare less noticeable.

I hung around for quite a while hoping for a cloud to shade the sun, but it didn’t happen and I finally gave up. But had it done so the image would have lost the light and shade which I think are essential.

A little further on we came to the spit between the two streams of the mouth of the Wandle. I’m still wasn’t quite sure that I’ve managed to capture what I wanted at this point, but but we were beginning to get a little cold and didn’t stay too long before making our way back to The Ship, a rather fine riverside pub close to Wandsworth Bridge.

After I’d taken my friend back to the station I had 25 minutes to wait for my own train and decided to take a few more pictures, getting back with just a few minutes to spare so I could go up onto the wrong platform and photograph the scene over the wall looking out on part of Wandsworth. It’s a street that has gone considerably up-market over the past 20 years, with general stores being turned into art galleries (where I went for an opening last year) and more.

Wandsworth Panoramas

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I was interested to read about the latest RPS project, Bleeding London, which calls itself ” the most ambitious photo project that the capital has ever seen – to photograph every street in London” because  it is more or less what I set out to do all on my own in the 1980s.

Samuel Stores, Artillery Lane, Spitalfields 1978  from London Dérives

Of course they aim to enrol a large army of volunteers and to do the job in six months, while I spent approaching 20 years, and didn’t quite finish it (and I started out knowing I wouldn’t literally do so.) They also restrict themselves to the ‘standard A to Z‘ while I made use of the rather wider Greater London version. Whatever the results, I think my project can claim to have been considerably (if not foolishly) more ‘ambitious’, and ended up with over 100,000 images.

Bungalows on edge of London, Hamsey Green, Tandridge, from London Buildings

Their inspiration – and title – comes from Geoff Nicholson‘s 1997 novel Bleeding London rather than directly from the A-Z London Atlas first published in 1938 by Phyllis Pearsall, who founded the Geographers’ Map Company to produce up-to-date street mapping of London in 1936. It is said that it was only in legend that “Working for up to eighteen hours a day, she walked a total of 3,000 miles while mapping London’s 23,000 streets” though probably a great deal of legwork was involved in checking details.

It is however completely untrue that the 1919 Ordnance Survey was the “most recently published London street map she could find” unless it means she simply did not look very hard. There were other street atlases existing. Perhaps she used that 1919 map because it was the only overall source of mapping she could use as a basis for her own for copyright reasons?

As Bruce Hunt states in his History of London Street Maps, the first London street atlas appears to have been published in 1720, pre-dating the A-Z by around 215 years, containing both a general map and “thirty-six maps of the Wards, Parishes and Liberties“.  Bacon‘s pocket series began in 1896, Bartholomew‘s in 1988, Philip‘s in 1902 and Geographia around 1922. All were readily available when Pearsall started work.

Her A-Z was successful because it was better organised than existing street atlases, as well as cheaper and lighter than most. I have a suspicion that she got the idea for the name from the ‘Philips A.B.C. Pocket Atlas Guide to London and its Outer Districts’  which was in to its 17th edition at the time (and which had rather clearer maps, in colour rather than the black and white of the early A-Z.) Her title was snappier, and A-Z appears rather more inclusive. The A-Z also gave some indication of street numbering on the major streets which could be extremely useful.

Shoreditch, 1978 From London Derives

My own work was inspired more by the work of photographers, notably Eugene Atget, than by novelists, and although I intended to look down every street in those areas I covered, I wanted only to photograph those aspects that interested me as either being typical or in some respect exceptional.

In particular I set out to show the whole range of London buildings, both the exceptional and the typical, including industrial, commercial, domestic and other types of buildings, but on those same long perambulations I also worked on other projects such as Café Ideal, Cool Blondes, and Paradise.

From the website and book ‘1989’

There may have been a literary inspiration too. In my book 1989 which is a kind of fictionalised account of a little of my work in that year my introduction (written in 2006) starts with a section that mentions two books, one the A-Z but also has oblique references to other written works:

“It was in 1989 that I met Upton Trent in Stratford and embarked on series of rambling walks through the streets of northeast London and that writer’s mind. Research for a novel that somehow never quite materialised and now that he is dead, never will, unless I write it myself. All that I have are the notes that I took on our excursions, as we headed up unlikely streets and alleys in a deliberate avoidance of any actual route or end, or jumped on buses that came to rest at lights or crossings as we passed (wherever possible he avoided both bus stops and full stops.)

We carried two books as guides on our journeys. One of course was Aragon’s ‘Paris Paysan’, and the other that we consulted only when lost and exhausted, his London ‘A-Z’. Half the pages of this were missing – probably removed for emergency duties – so it was often of little help.  Occasionally he’d pull out a crumpled magazine feature, book page or newspaper article from his pocket, liberated during his visits to dentist’s waiting rooms and libraries, but we could seldom make out more than a few incomplete sentences. I never bothered to take notes from these; after all I could always repeat the process myself, as his pickings seemed entirely random.  I think it was how he wrote most of his novels.”

You can also see my comments on ‘1989’ in two posts on this site, ‘1989‘ and  A Book At Last: 1989 and there is an earlier version of the work on the web.

Coopers Lane/High Road Leyton from ‘1989’

You can learn more about the ‘Bleeding London’ project by reading through FAQs, and it is a project open to anyone who wants to take part using almost any way of taking photographs. The newsletter says that there are 300 people already signed up, and they need at least 1,000.

My  last paper edition of the ‘standard’ A-Z is dated 1990, and has 140 pages of street names from Abbess Clo. to Zoffany St., each with 4 columns of around 85 lines. Most street entries take a single line, but some occupy two, but at a rough estimate, this makes for around 45,000 streets, and a few more have been added in the last 25 years. So with a thousand members that makes around 45 each. The number isn’t a great problem, but the organisation certainly is.

I did think briefly about taking part when I heard about it a couple of weeks ago, but not for long. It’s an idea which I think is past its time. Because almost every street in London is now available at the click of a mouse thanks to Google Street View.
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I like the Druids. Not that I’d want to be one, but they have an eccentricity that appeals to me, and visually they are rather striking. I don’t like them enough to go to Stonehenge for the solstices (and things get rather crowded and confused there with so many claiming a right to the space) but their two annual performances in London are certainly worth a visit from time to time.  I don’t intend to be rude or belittling when I describe them as eccentric; eccentricity is one of the great British characteristics, and something that many of us share to some extent. And something that I admire if not in this particular aspect wanting to share.

Though I do feel a little eccentric holding up a camera on top of a pole and pressing the cable release to take pictures like the one above. Or even leaning out over a wall to photograph the procession as in the picture below.

I wasn’t sure about the angle when I took this picture, lining up the edge of the frame carefully (or at least fairly carefully – you can still see a little of it at the bottom right) with the edge of the wall in this uncropped image) but it seems to have a certain logic. As you can see in Druids celebrate the Spring Equinox I made some pictures with the camera level (or intended to be level and not far off) too, but the wall rather gets in the way to my eye.

Back to the monopod image, I’ve still not found a good way to keep the camera level when holding it up above my head. And for these images taken with the 16mm full-frame fisheye that is rather important.  It needs to be level in two dimensions, with both ends of the camera to avoid a tilted horizon, and with the lens not looking up or down in order to get a straight horizon. As you can see above, I’ve not quite managed this, though I don’t find the fairly slight curve of the horizon too distracting.

This image was converted using the Fisheye Hemi plugin as I do with most images taken with this lens, which removes the curvature of vertical lines. But if the camera is tilted, these lines will either converge or diverge, which can sometimes look odd. There is a very slight divergence visible in the building at the right of the image, but hardly noticeable.

My reason for making the picture from this side of the circle was partly because of the position of the sun, just out of picture to the right, but mainly to put the Tower of London and Tower Bridge more or less in the middle of the picture.  Another reason is that the leading figures in the Druid circle and the standards are also visible on the far side of the circle – their backs are less interesting.

You can of course see them more clearly in a conventional photograph taken with the 18-105mm from a normal eye level, which also shows how the high viewpoint of the top image makes the Tower and Tower Bridge more prominent.

I’d forgotten to put back the 70-300mm in my camera bag when I rushed out to catch the train, and this is an event you have to work from outside the circle, and the distances across it are rather high. But it would have been one more lens to work with, and changing lenses can be a pain. It’s probably best to leave it at home except on those occasions a very long lens is essential.

With people standing in a circle, you can take pictures like this that most people think were taken from inside, standing behind people further around the circle and aiming my 18-105mm lens though the gap between two of them. It was probably taken from more or less the same  position as the image below, made shortly before with the 16mm fisheye.

This part of the event, with the figures around the circle joining hands to renew their vows as druids is one of the visual high points, and you can see different ways I’ve tried to show it in My London Diary.

The pictures in Druids celebrate the Spring Equinox are posted in the sequence that I took them (with possibly some very minor variations) and along with the text I hope give a good idea of what happens. You can also find some other examples of my pictures from Tower Hill in previous years, most recently in 2009.

What is rather surprising about the event is how few people came to watch it. I’d come with an old friend and there was another photographer and just a handful of onlookers. The event at Primrose Hill for the Autumn Equinox attracts more people, but again I think relatively few who have actually come for the event.
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