One of many food stalls at the Somerstown Festival of Cultures
Last Saturday I was in St Pancras, not the station but the area of London just to the west of it, photographing two linked events, one a neighbourhood street festival in an area which includes many people from various countries around the world, and the other, just a few yards away, a part of one of our great institutions, the British Library.
The BL is also one of our younger institutions, and until around 40 years ago was simply a part of the British Museum, with the great reading room at the centre of that complex. I got to know it and took just a handful of pictures of it when my wife worked there in the early 1970s, though those negatives are now sadly in a very poor state. But although the new building has many advantages, and I’ve been to several fine exhibitions there, its always seemed to me architecturally disappointing. I find the interior disorientating and the exterior rather a hotchpotch that lacks the kind of organisation I admire. Much of the site too is covered by a large courtyard which appears 99.9% of the time to be unused and a kind of no-man’s land between the street and the library.
But this was one of the rare occasions when it was being made use of, for a festival of Latin American music and dance, Fiesta!, and I split my time between covering the dancers here and the street festival a short block away, though I also tried with little success to photograph a demonstration in Trafalgar Square a short tube ride away which, as is often the case, was rather less of an event than expected.
Many of the dancers had exotic costumes and it would have been hard to take a picture of them which didn’t have at least some interest because of this. The main visual problem I had was in trying to place the event in context. The building isn’t very recognisable and in any case for nearly all the time I had my back both to it and also to the audience, which was generally rather sparse and spread out. Probably the most recognisable feature on the site is the statue Newton, after William Blake by Sir Eduardo Paolozzi, and I used this in the background in a number of images, although it raised the second problem later in the day in that it meant working more or less directly towards the sun.
Light levels were generally fairly high through the day, and so was the heat. I felt for the guys dancing in heavy costumes, I was having enough of a problem simply standing in the sun to take pictures. More pictures on My London Diary
At the street festival, almost every picture seemed to be in a mixture of sun and shade, and although sometimes I could use fill, for other pictures it wasn’t possible or I didn’t have time to put the flash on the right camera. Using two bodies I find it just too much to have both with flashes in the hot shoe, so generally find I have it on the wrong one when I have to grab a pictures quickly!
But really I just could not get into the mood. I often find it hard to start taking pictures, there is a kind of mental barrier to climb to overcome my very British inhibitions, but usually once I start things are fine. It didn’t quite happen at this event, and I don’t know why. Perhaps it was connected with going back and forth from one thing to another and not really getting stuck in, perhaps it was the heat, but somehow I just couldn’t relax and get on with the job. So although there are a few pictures on My London Diary that are OK, I wasn’t satisfied with the day.