A puzzle in SE16

Digital photography – in all its ubiquitous availability, ease and cheapness - challenges us with the question “what to photograph?” (as opposed to “what not to photograph?”). The habit encourages us to observe, and to frame and crop our perceptions automatically. There’s no shortage of subjects – the visible world and its occupants for starters – plus a vast number of stylistic approaches, themes and tropes. Once the province of professionals and clever arty people, all these tricks and techniques are now available to us all every time we venture out of the house.

Traditionally, photographers have loved contrasts – not just visual contrasts of light and dark - but conceptual contrasts such as old and new, ugly and beautiful (which is which?), rich and poor, exceptional and normal. Absurdity, the surreality of things out of context, improbable juxtapositions, the elephant in the high street, have long been popular themes. Today, since most of us routinely go out armed with a device able to capture and record the unexpected and the startling, all we have to do is keep our eyes open, hope we get lucky, and pray that a white van doesn’t come along at the crucial moment.

I’ve long been a fan of monkey puzzle trees (Araucaria araucana). When I was growing up there was one in a front garden at the top of our road. They are intrinsically suburban, arguably naff and of doubtful taste, and for that reason alone I love them. For I am indeed incurably suburban, and I adore the life-affirming, endlessly optimistic attitudes, ambitions, and activities of suburban man and woman. In the suburbs you can have something huge, not particularly pretty, but exotically South American in your front garden (not your back garden – what would be the point ?). Wow.

 
Rotherhithe, London SE16, is not suburban. To the extent that it has survived the Luftwaffe and the rather more determined attempts of “developers” it is intensely urban, following the winding south bank of the Thames. It lies at the southern portal of the Thames Tunnel, the work of the Brunels - father Marc and more famous son Isambard Kingdom – which is now subsumed within (perversely) the Overground network. Commemorating the twin-bore subfluvial achievement is a museum in the former engine house, as shown in the photograph above. The splendid monkey puzzle tree nearby provides, I think, one of those absurd contrasts that delight the photographer, and whose ever-present possibility makes our capital city such an endlessly fascinating territory to explore.