Prints and Drawings Room
View by appointment- Artist
- Peter Kindersley
- Medium
- Photograph, c-print on paper
- Dimensions
- Image: 379 × 379 mm
- Collection
- Tate
- Acquisition
- Gift Eric and Louise Franck London Collection 2017
- Reference
- P14716
Summary
This group of seven colour photographs by Peter Kindersley are from a series made over several years titled Details of London at Night. It was published as a photo essay in the magazine Intelligent Life in 2010, alongside an introduction by Joanna Pitman in which she describes Kindersley’s project in the following way:
Tracing the breadth and depth of his chosen neighbourhoods, Kindersley’s unprejudiced eye fixes on angles and views that few of us notice amid the clutter of our daily lives. He gives value to the slightest things, so that a council-estate car park or an ivy-covered trellis becomes as deserving of respect as Tower 42 (the former NatWest tower) or the London Eye. His glimpses are both inviting and sinister.
(Quoted at https://www.1843magazine.com/features/photo-essay/london-for-loners, accessed 23 November 2016.)
In the photograph titled Aldgate East, Kindersley depicts a deserted, nocturnal Petticoat Lane. While the brightly lit skyscraper Tower 42 glitters against the night sky in the background, the shuttered shopfronts and empty market stalls cast long shadows in the foreground. Kindersley is particularly drawn to market stalls stripped of their wares: ‘I found the empty stall fascinating…They reminded me of the bones of skeletons abandoned on the street.’ (Quoted in ibid.) Another work with the same title shows a poorly lit, narrow lane, at the end of which 30 St Mary Axe, the building widely known informally as The Gherkin, seems to appear precisely at the point at which all lines of perspective in the image converge. Kindersley is interested in this juxtaposition of new and old architecture: ‘I am always looking for those run-down old buildings that could have featured in Hogarth’s paintings…Modern skyscrapers tend to protrude out of those gritty old back streets in central London. The documenting of that has become an ongoing obsession. It’s a constant reminder of the evolution of the city.’ (Ibid.)
Whitechapel is an image taken from the inside of an enclosed alley, which is bathed in artificial lighting with a sickly green hue. The aged cobblestones on the ground contrast with the more recent addition of graffiti on the adjacent, tiled walls. Vauxhall and London Bridge both make a feature of familiar items of street furniture: a red letter box and a red phone box. In both cases, lit up office blocks rise up behind them, they appear almost anachronistic in the setting of a modern city.
Most of the photographs are devoid of people. However, occasionally, as in the image titled Blackheath, a figure is included by chance. With Canary Wharf glowing in the distance, the illuminated rear of a Victorian terrace reveals a lone figure in one of the windows. Kindersley wrote of this particular shot: ‘I was walking carefully along a pitch-black path, holding onto the rail, and I came across this house still lit up. I wanted to show Victorian housing contrasting with the modernity of Canary Wharf. I only discovered the man washing up in the upstairs window after I printed the image.’ (Ibid.)
He has written of his approach to finding locations in London to document:
I have a huge map of London on my wall…I like to pick out an area I don’t know and drive around it to see what I can find to photograph. I’m looking for a side of London that we don’t normally see. Occasionally I catch sight of something, a view or just the atmosphere of a place, which communicates its loneliness or emptiness.
(Ibid.)
Further reading
Peter Kindersley and Joanna Pitman, ‘London for Loners: Sunday Nights’, Intelligent Life Magazine, Winter 2010, http://moreintelligentlife.co.uk/gallery/london-loners-sunday-nights, accessed May 2015.
Helen Delaney
November 2016
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