I chose to profile the s era in my image, photographing women and children in vintage one-piece swimwear and period dresses; the men in the shot were going about their daily business against the iconic background of the Thames and Tower Bridge. Interposed are some of the entertainments of the day, Punch and Judy shows, donkey rides, and fast food on offer, ice-cream and hot dog stalls.
Most of the stalls and equipment were designed to facilitate a hasty retreat from the artificially prepared beach as the tide began to rise. The street lead to a ferry landing which was then, the only crossing point for miles. The inhabitants of the street were fishermen, watermen, and small traders; their families lived in extreme poverty. Today, Chiswick is a leafy suburb in the west of London. There are many anecdotal indications that the old cottages truly did harbour local ladies fighting against their poverty by providing carnal pleasures to travellers crossing the river by ferry.
I wondered how the whores made a living and thought of passing kings and bishops on their way to Hampton Court. The Thames being the main thoroughfare from Tudor times onwards. This race annually attracts several hundred crews from all over the globe. Yachting and rowing clubs line the banks of the river. Every day of the week and especially on weekends, yachtsmen and rowers can be seen enjoying their hobby, whatever the weather. One such club, the London Corinthian Sailing Club was forced to relocate its clubhouse in the s after its previous clubhouse was deemed unsafe having suffering severe bomb damage from a V-1 flying bomb during WW II.
The clubhouse had to be demolished and the club moved a mere metres upstream. From this elevated position yacht racing officials and the occasional guest, have a clear uninterrupted view along the entire racecourse. The Grain Tower is an off-shore fort that was built in the middle of the 19th Century to protect the River Thames from invasion by the French navy. Standing metres out to sea, it can only be reached a high tide by boat or at low-tide by a causeway.
The tower was initially oval and three stories high, with 3. Internal gangways connected various parts of the building. My story involves a report in The Times newspaper of 23rd May , which reported that Marie Eugenie, the youngest daughter of Captain E. Lloyd of the Royal Engineers had died at the Grain Tower. We can assume that he was the commanding officer at the time, also that his wife and daughter were residing in the barracks. Marie Eugenie may have fallen sick from tuberculosis, then a very common cause of death, or experienced a fatal accident.
In my image we see the disconsolate father carrying the body of his precious daughter across the causeway to her burial place on the mainland, in Grain.
She was frustrated in her love of Hamlet. The painting shows the beautiful and vulnerable Ophelia lying on her back in a stream after falling from a tree, still clutching flowers that she had just collected. She was singing, unaware of her eminent pending doom. Air trapped in her clothing kept her afloat until they were saturated, and she drowned.
It is well known that Millais created the painting in two stages. The first stage in was to paint the background, using the Hogsmill River at Ewell in Surrey as his location. She had been a milliner and was only 19 years old when discovered by the Pre-Raphaelites, who appreciated her unique beauty. She sat for several of them before Millais hired her for his painting of the second part of his Ophelia project. I decided that this justified including the very moving story of the creation of Millais painting in the project.
I was aware that several other photographers had shot versions of the Ophelia painting. Furthermore, recognising their importance to the interpretation of the content of the painting I replicated in my image every single flower present in the painting. In addition, I ensured that my model had similar features, hair and skin colouring to those of Lizzie.
I dressed her in an antique dress onto which my stylist handstitched the gold applique to replicate the dress she wore in the painting.
Now winter time he kept the water warm with oil lamps placed under the tub. Once, pre-occupied with his work, he let the oil lamps go out. Lizzie lay acquiescent in the increasingly colder water for several hours, afterwards she became very ill and was sickly for the rest of her short life. To ease her health problems she took laudanum, an opiate, and became addicted to it.
She experienced a long and turbulent relationship with another famous Pre-Raphaelite painter, Dante Gabriel Rossetti before marrying him and bearing a still-born baby daughter. Depressed, she died from an overdose of laudanum, at Amy Johnson gained worldwide recognition and became the heroine of the British population, especially among women, when in at 27, she became the first female pilot to fly solo from Britain to Australia.
Her plane was a second-hand de Havilland Gipsy Moth bi-plane. She named it Jason. It now hangs in the Science Museum in London. She subsequently set records for flights to Moscow, New York and Tokyo, and survived several crash landings in doing so.
As well as gaining her incredible pilot credentials, she graduated from Sheffield University with a Bachelor Degree in Economics.
Their job was to ferry military aircraft, fighters and bombers, single-handedly to various RAF bases around the country. My image illustrates the tragic death of this remarkable woman. No one knows quite how long ago the figure of Father Thames was first invoked. It's likely that people have always paid obeisance to the river in one form or another. Archaeologists have plenty of evidence for river worship in London.
Treasures like the Iron Age Battersea Shield shown below might have been votive offerings, given in deference or placation to the river. This beautiful object was dredged from the river in , not far from where the Father Thames sculpture now resides. You can view it in the British Museum, near to a horned helmet of similar age, found below Waterloo Bridge in Peter Ackroyd in his biography of the river reckons Father Thames "bears a striking resemblance to the tutelary gods of the Nile and the Tiber".
Gods such as the Roman Tiberinus share the long hair and beard of Father Thames. Ackroyd sees their flowing follicles as simulacra of the river itself. Meanwhile, the Egyptian goddess Isis had strong connections to the River Nile, and also lends her name to parts of the Thames, especially in the sections through Oxford where the river is usually called The Isis.
The connection is strengthened in a couplet by 18th century poet Matthew Prior:. London's most impressive representation of the river god can be found in Trinity Square, near The Tower. The divinity perches high on the former Port of London Authority building. Caught flying in bad weather, Amy used a parachute escape, but to no avail. Hasselblad Ambassador Julia Fullerton-Batten is a worldwide acclaimed and exhibited fine-art photographer. Her body of work now encompasses twelve major projects spanning a decade of engagement in the field.
She has won countless awards for both her commercial and fine-art work and became a Hasselblad Master in Learn more about Julia Fullerton-Batten here. Discovering his new home of Doha, Qatar through the lens of street photography, Heath Holden explored the older and more traditional neighborhoods of the historical city. Unable to become a pilot due to his eyesight, the young Swiss photographer and later professor of technical thermodynamics Walter Janach channeled his passion for aviation into capturing these majestic flying machines on his C.
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