Bromley isn’t a town I visit often, out on the south east fringes of London, although I have been there a number of times to take photographs, both when I was carrying out my extended project ‘The Buildings of London‘ – when few areas within the M25 escaped my attention completely – and, more recently working on the project on May Queens.
Bromley is in the centre of the London May Queen realms, and I had hoped to get a set of my pictures of May Queen events ready for the group show that I helped hang in Bromley Central Library this lunchtime, but the first three months of 2011 have been too crowded with protests for me to get seriously to work on that, and instead I’m showing half a dozen of my Paris 1988 pictures, half the set I showed last year at the Juggler as my contribution to ‘Paris – New York – London’ and less than a tenth of the pictures in my Blurb book Paris 1988.
Rue Piat, Belleville, Paris 20e, August 1988
It’s a pity, since quite a few pictures for the May Queens were actually taken in the park just a few yards from the library entrance, where, after a parade through the town by five May Queen realms from the surrounding area – West Wickham, Hayes, Hayes Common a, Shortlands and Bromley Common, together with the London May Queen and her retinue, several of the local May Queens are crowned by the London May Queen in ceremonies that had their genesis around a hundred years ago.
Bromley May Queen crowning in Church House Gardens
I’m still hoping to produce a book on this, having narrowly failed to get a major museum to put on a show a few years ago. It would be nice to get it out for this May, but I think we are perhaps in for a spring of discontent that will keep me too busy, and I have a very important engagement out of London that will keep me from this year’s major event at Hayes.
The show continues at Bromley Central Library until Tuesday 19 April and is open during normal library hours. We are having a fairly informal opening next Wednesday – 13 April – from 6.30-8.30pm and everyone is invited to came and have a drink, see the work and meet most of the 8 photographers.
Although I’m not showing work on protests, there are some black and pictures from recent London events taken by Sam Tanner. Around the corner from them are some very different, almost abstract, images from a derelict fort by David Malarkey.
The group is formed of members of London Independent Photography who attend regular monthly group meetings to show and discuss their latest work. One of a number of LIP groups, this one used to meet in Twickenham, fairly close to my home, but has since moved away, first to Thornton Heath and is now in West Wickham, and I’m now rather an irregular visitor.