The Secret Is Out – Now On The Wall

Finally my pictures for the show ‘Secret Gardens of St John’s Wood‘ are up on the wall and you can see it at The Queen’s Terrace Café in St John’s Wood from today until 5 Nov 2011. The café, at 7 Queen’s Terrace, London NW8 6DX (020 7449 2998), is open from 9-6 Monday to Saturday, and I can recommend the salads, cakes, coffee, teas and fruit juices, having sampled many of them over the several months I’ve been working on this project.

© 2011, Peter Marshall
Four large paintings by Mark Cazalet on the main wall of the café in its first show

I’ve written before about the café and the two previous shows, by painters Mark Cazalet and Jiro Osuga, who turned the space into Jiro’s Café.

© 2011, Peter Marshall
The opening night of Café Jiro at the Queen’s Terrace Café – and a fiendish quiz

Jiro has also had a hand in the current show, which is a project initiated and researched by café proprietor Mireille Galinou, following on from her book on St John’s Wood,  Cottages and Villas: The Birth of the Garden Suburb, published by Yale University Press last year.  All I had to do was to make appointments with the owners of the gardens she had selected and to take a panoramic photograph of them. Jiro has designed and decorated the café as a ‘garden’ in which to show the photographs – some quite large, and also in the show is a fine large screen ‘The Walled Garden’ that he painted in 2004.

Of course I ended up taking more than one panorama of each of the gardens that I photographed, and there are a few that have more than one picture in the show. But I also agreed to design and produce (through Blurb) a book of the same name as the show, and although this covers the same gardens as the exhibition it has around four times as many pictures, mainly panoramic.

Altogether I photographed around 20 private gardens for the project, as well as taking pictures in various public places and there were a few we decided for various reasons to leave out of the show and book, though there is a possibility, still under discussion, that this might be the start of a larger archive.  I started work on the project in mid-May and took the last picture for the show on 2 August.

I spent between half an hour and an hour and a quarter in each garden. In some it was easy to find a viewpoint, but others were more difficult. A few had so many possibilities it was hard to know when to stop. But of course the time there was only the start of making the pictures. On average, processing the raw files and combining between 2 and 18 into a single image using PtGui software took another half day for each garden, and it was a lot of extra work to cram into the time.  Travelling too ate up my time – around an hour and a half each way on every visit to the area.

The book is currently only available at the café – after all these gardens are secret – and it costs £20 for 80 pages with 76 of my pictures and some text and other illustrations.  (We might be persuaded to post a copy for another £2.50.) Unlike my other books it is not available direct from Blurb, but it costs less than it would direct. So far I’ve had to order two batches and I expect to have to get more printed. I think for the first time I may be producing an actual limited edition, though I’ve not yet decided if it will be 200 or 500 copies.

You will have noticed too that there are none of my garden pictures here – you will have to come to the café to see them, though perhaps I will put some pictures from the opening next week in a later post. I’ll also perhaps write a little about how I produced the pictures and the various problems I had.

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