camden town revisited (for an hour)
I lived in Camden Town, London NW1 for most of the nineties, watching it transform itself from a quirky, eclectic market rabble to an immense tourist destination with a Holiday Inn. I remember the Lock from childhood canal walks with my brothers and my Dad, who would walk so fast I would have to run to keep up. Yesterday, in the bright pre-Spring sunshine before the hoards landed, I took an hour and went for a little walkabout, looking for clues to the various elements of the Camden I knew. Despite the Starbucks occupation of the Lock Keeper’s Cottage, the Regent’s Canal (part of the Grand Union that will take you all the way to Birmingham Gas Works Basin at 4mph in a barge) remains relatively unchanged. It still offers respite from the human and automotive traffic all around. In its mad mix of restored and decaying, historic and graffiti-smothered, it is rich with pictures, ripe for the taking.
I worked with a pair of little Sigma cameras ( DP1 and DP2), lightweight, awkward to use and requiring the use of feet to zoom. With their fixed lenses and large Foveon sensors, they slow me down and produce images reminiscent of slide film. I converted the images to monochrome as a nod to my own photographic past, wandering and looking with no agenda, making pictures for the love of it.
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