A Northerner’s photographic images of the American south

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THE PHOTOGRAPHER BALDWIN Lee, a Chinese American, was born in Brooklyn (New York) in 1951. He studied photography at MIT and then at Yale. In 1982, he was appointed Professor of Photography at the University of Tennessee, where he established the university’s photography course. As a New Yorker born and bred, he was amazed at the contrast between living conditions in the southern states and where he had come from. He began making tours of the south, photographing members of various African Americans at home, at work, and at play. Over the years he took more than 10000 photos. All of them are in the black and white format. Apart from being fascinating glimpses of the everyday lives of low income ‘black’ Southerners, they are beautifully composed, superbly detailed images – well worth seeing, as we did recently at the David Hill Gallery in London’s Ladbroke Grove.

At his gallery, David Hill discussed Lee’s work with us. What particularly interested me was that Lee used (still uses) an old-fashioned field camera with a lens made before WW1. He chose this old lens because unlike modern lenses its glass has no coating. Also, and this is something I learned long ago, many of these older lenses were hand ground, rather than machine made. This resulted in the lens having a far better resolution than many of the best quality lenses that were available in the 1980s. The type of camera that Lee used to make his splendid photographs was not dissimilar to the kind of camera that early photographers such as Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879) used to create images. The lens on the simple camera that Lee used projects an image onto a ground glass screen at the back of the camera. In Victorian times, a prepared glass photographic plate used to be attached to the rear of the camera to capture the image. Lee, working more that 100 years later, captured his images on sheets of 5×4 inch high quality, fast negative monochrome film. Using these, Lee was able to create high resolution photographic images, and his subjects did not have to hold their poses for nearly as long as was the case when Cameron was creating her photographs. Because Lee’s subjects did not have to maintain their poses for more than a few seconds, his images are far clearer than Cameron’s whose subjects often had to try to remain still for many minutes. This meant that in addition to the deliberate artistic manipulations that Cameron made in her dark room, the inevitable slight movements that her subjects made added to the interestingly other-worldly images she created.

The advantage of using an old-fashioned camera and lens, such as Lee employed, was that it was a high-quality pin-hole camera. Unlike modern cameras, these present hardly anything that might alter the light entering the camera and affect the images.  I found it fascinating that apart from taking advantage of the improvements in film quality this superb photographer prefers to use a camera that would have been familiar to Julia Margaret Cameron rather than a modern one that made the light entering it take a complicated path from the outside world to the film surface.

You can read more about Cameron in my book, which is available here:

A boundary stone in a Dalston railway station

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WE VISIT KINGSLAND Road in London’s Dalston district frequently for several reasons: to eat Turkish food, to watch films at the Rio Cinema, and to enjoy plays at the Arcola Theatre. Using the Overground is quite a convenient way for us to reach the area. We use trains to and from Dalston Kingsland station. The station, close to the colourful Ridley Road market, was opened in 1850 as part of The North London Railway. Today, it is a busy station on the Overground Network.

Today (20th of July 2023), whilst walking along the westbound platform, I noticed something for the first time. It was a small white object a bit like a milestone standing a few feet east of the bridge that carries Boleyn Road over the western part of the station. It bears the date 1863. And below that there are the letters:

“St M. 1”

And at the bottom of the object is the following:

“JOSEPH SURR JUNr

WILLIAM HARVEY

CHARLES SAWBRIDGE”

They are all described as “Church wardens.”

I suspect that the stone is or was a parish boundary marker. On a map surveyed in 1870, there is a line marked “Parliamentary Boundary”, rather than ‘Parish Boundary’, running through the very spot where the marker stone stands today. The “St M” might refer to the local parish Church of St Marks. Although I cannot yet be certain, it is possible that the parish and parliamentary boundaries were in the same place where the stone stands today.  Oddly, various searches of the Internet produced hardly any information about the stone except that one person, writing on Twitter, wondered if it had been moved to its present position from another place. This is unlikely because I have discovered that a boundary marker in exactly the same position as that which I saw today is marked on a detailed map surveyed in 1893-94.

The date “1863” is curious because the present Church of St Marks in Dalston was only constructed between 1864 and 1866. Maybe, there was an earlier parish church, or possibly the parish was only established in 1863. Who knows?

It is interesting that one small item, the boundary stone at Dalston Kingsland, can give rise to so many mysteries.

A visit to Cosmic House in Kensington

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ALTHOUGH IT IS NEAR where we live, I had never heard of the Cosmic House at 19 Lansdowne Walk near Holland Park. Recently, our daughter went to a special event there and was so impressed by the place that she very kindly gave me admission tickets for my Father’s Day gift.

Cosmic House, initially called ‘Thematic House’, was designed by the American born writer, theorist, and architect Charles Jencks (1939-2019). It is a heavily modified building first erected in the early 1840s. Jencks purchased it in 1978 and had completed most of its many dramatic alterations by 1983. It is a song of praise to Post Modernism. Because Jencks was fascinated by cosmology, the house’s various rooms and other spaces have been designed with cosmological ideas in mind. For me, the most exciting element of this house is the spiral staircase from which all the rooms on various levels can be accessed. Each room contains a riot of decorative motifs. Jencks let his imagination run wild. Some of the rooms, such as the library and the jacuzzi area (inspired by a dome designed by Borromini), are extremely effective. Some of the other rooms, are, as Jencks can be heard admitting in a film we were shown, a bit ‘over the top’.

The shapes of the rooms and the various spaces in Cosmic House show that Jencks was a great architect. However, I felt that they were somewhat disguised by the flamboyant interior décor, which was designed mainly by Jencks. With natural light accessing the building in many ingenious ways and the profusion of objets d’art in many of the rooms, we were reminded a bit of the ‘atmosphere’ of the Sir John Soane Museum in London’s Lincolns Inn Fields.

As a Father’s Day gift, a visit to Cosmic House was certainly original. It is a place worth visiting, possibly on the same day as a visit to another highly original edifice nearby – Leighton House.

A sign with missing vowels in Shepherds Bush

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IN SHEPHERDS BUSH Market, I noticed a shop sign written in Arabic, Ethiopian and Latin scripts. The Latin script read as follows:

“Afrcan custmory grments shop”.

Was this bad spelling of English words or maybe something else? It might have been the latter as I will try to explain using two examples.

When I was a dental surgeon, I worked for a while with a wonderful assistant from Uganda. Her English was very good, but when she saw me eating potato crisps at lunch time, she used to ask me whether I was enjoying my “crisips”.  The other example concerned a couple of Italian friends who had been living together since they were both 18 years old. Just after their 40th birthdays, they married suddenly. When we asked them why, the lady said in English:

“For physical regions.”

We were surprised. It turned out that what she was trying to say in her Italian accented English was that they had married for FISCAL reasons.

Both my Ugandan assistant and our Italian friend had inserted vowels between two consecutive consonants where they did not exist in the properly pronounced versions of ‘crisps’ and ‘fiscal’. Remembering this, I wonder whether whomever had written the shop sign in Shepherd Bush Market had thought it unnecessary to put in various vowels where they should have been because they believed that readers of their sign would automatically add vowel sounds between some pairs of consonants. This kind of reader would probably read the misspelt signs as follows:

“African customary garments shop”

If this is not the case, then the signwriter needs to improve his or her spelling of English words.

A Ford Zodiac in Notting Hill and hot weather

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TODAY THE TEMPERATURE in Athens (Greece) will exceed 35 degrees Celsius, and in Rome it is predicted to reach 42 degrees in two days’ time. Two years ago, a temperature of 48 degrees was recorded in Sicily. So, it seems that so-called Global Warming is happening with vigour. Meanwhile, this Sunday (16th of July 2023) in London, we enjoyed a breezy morning with temperatures not greater than a pleasant 21.

While walking along Portobello Road this Sunday, we spotted a beautifully cared for open-topped Ford Zodiac. These vehicles were manufactured between 1950 and 1972. I remember seeing them in my childhood and teenage years. In those days, I was not much interested in cars, but now when I see one that used to be common in my earlier years, I find them worthy of examination. I took several photographs of the Zodiac and then headed for the bus stop from which we were returning home.

Despite the external temperature being 21 degrees or less, it was far warmer inside the bus although its windows being open. The higher temperatures that we have been experiencing here in London and are now affecting places near the Mediterranean are commonly believed to be at least partly due to emissions produced by fossil fuels, such as petrol. As we moved homewards, a thought struck me. The beautiful Ford Zodiac, which we had just seen, is aesthetically pleasing and a souvenir of one of the great eras of automobile engineering, but it is also an ‘ancestor’ of Global Warming. Beautiful as it is, it too burns fossil fuel and makes its own contribution to what is believed to be causing dangerously high air temperatures in many parts of the world.

Getting around the planning regulations in London and Oxo cubes

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DESPITE THE PRESENCE of many distinctive buildings constructed on the south bank of the River Thames since the end of WW2, the OXO tower built in about 1929 is still a noteworthy and unusual landmark. OXO, just in case you do not already know, is a company that is most famous for its meat extract cubes, which can be dissolved to make soups, nutritious teas, and gravies. The company uses a process for making meat extract (in liquid form) that was invented in 1840 by the German scientist Baron Justus von Liebig (1803-1873). In 1866, Liebig’s Extract of Meat Company (‘LEMCO’) was founded in Britain. At first it produced the liquid form of the meat extract, which was quite costly. So, they developed a cheaper solid form, which was sold as OXO cubes, and they are still available today.

In the 1920s, LEMCO acquired the riverside building (opposite St Paul’s Cathedral), which had been first used as a power station for the Post Office. The company modified it considerably to produce an edifice with Art Deco features. This was designed by the company’s architect Albert Moore between 1928 and 1929. LEMCO wanted their effectively new building to include a tower with illuminated advertising signs. However, at that time, planning permission for skyline advertising near the riverfront was refused.  The architect came up with a brilliant solution to get around the planning regulations.

The square tower was designed with three windows on each of its four external walls. Each set of windows were shaped as a pair of circles separated by a cross shaped like an ‘X’. Thus, each of the four sets of windows spelled the name ‘OXO’. Even during daytime, when there are no lights switched on behind the windows’ glass panes, the name OXO can be seen from quite a distance. Because they were designed as windows, the planning authorities were in a weak position to object, and LEMCO got away with their attempt to use the tower to advertise.

By the 1970s, the OXO building had fallen into disuse. In the 1990s, the building along with its distinctive tower began to be redeveloped for use as housing, retail, and recreational purposes (including a now famous restaurant). At night the windows on the tower now are surrounded by neon lighting and the windows spelling out ‘OXO; can be seen from afar. OXO still exists, but it is now owned in the UK by Premier Foods.

Quilts in a wonderfully designed library

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OUR FRIEND MIKAEL is an accomplished creative quilter (maker of quilts). Some of her artistic quilting is on display alongside works by other quilters in London’s Swiss Cottage Library until the 26th of July 2023. I must admit that when I learned that we were going to see an exhibition of quilts, my heart sank a bit. However, I am glad we went. I had no idea how creative and imaginative quilt makers can be. Well displayed in Swiss Cottage Library, there is a collection of extremely artistic contemporary quilts, which are well worth seeing. Far from simply being scraps of material stitched together, the quilters have used their imaginations and skills to create artworks which are not only beautiful but superbly innovative.

Until I entered Swiss Cottage Library today, I cannot recall having been inside it since about 1965 when I left the nearby Hall School, aged 13. I have passed its distinctive exterior often but never bothered to go inside. I was at the school between 1960 and 1965, and I remember visiting the then new library after it opened in November 1964. It was designed in the Modernist style by Basil Spence (1907-1976), who was born in Bombay. He based his library on the design of several that he had visited in Scandinavia. All that I can recall of the new library was that its shelves contained a far better range of books than our local library in Golders Green. Being a pupil in the area, I was able to borrow books from the Swiss Cottage Library, which I used to visit often because I found it to be so wonderful.

Although I can remember the superb collection of books that existed in 1964-1965, I could not recall the appearance of the library’s interior. It was only today when we visited the quilting show that I appreciated what a superb job had been done by Basil Spence and his team. Even though it was designed in the early 1960s, the style of the well-lit spacious interior has not dated at all. The interior of the library is far more intelligently conceived than most new British buildings created in the last few years. It is uplifting to wander around the various peaceful spaces within the library. If it were nearer home, it would be a place where I would want to go regularly to read and write.

I am grateful that Mikael invited us to see the quilting exhibition not only because it contained aesthetically pleasing works of art but also because I got to go back inside the library. Although I was not particularly interested in architecture when I was 11, my fascination with it began to grow a few years later. There was even a brief period in my life when I toyed with the idea of becoming an architect. Even though I did not pursue that profession, my love of good architecture – both modern and historical – has persisted. I believe that now, in my retirement, my appreciation of great buildings (such as Swiss Cottage Library) is greater than it has ever been. Even if you miss the quilting exhibition, it is worth making a detour to see Spence’s wonderful creation – both inside and outside.