black and white photography by rob gardiner.

Today is Worldwide Pinhole Day. Now in its fifth year, the concept is that pinhole enthusiasts simultaneously take photographs on this specific day and post the results to a central website. Last year it garnered more than 1800 entries. I’m not usually one to join in these activities, but with my recent injury I’ve been missing photography. All manner of pinhole cameras are used on the day, homemade cameras that began life as milk cartons, biscuit tins or even empty beer cans. With my trusty sidekick lending a couple of extra arms, I set off to re-photograph an old staple. Regulars to the site are surely thoroughly fed up with the reshoots of the Eye, but I find it endlessly fascinating. Shot on a 4x5 pinhole camera loaded with Polaroid 55 film.

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All winter I have been fascinated by construction works on Ironmonger Lane in London, so much so that I ensured it was on my daily walk and I could take in the transformation. Piece by piece the entire lane was stripped down 12 inches by a 5 man team and relaid in shiny bricks that probably came from Spain. An A-Frame information board announced it was a 14 week “Street Improvement Project” and presented a badly photoshopped vision for the future complete with levitating people walking by. It was all very exciting. Without further ado, I present Ironmonger Lane 2006 (top) and Ironmonger Lane 2005 (below).

As you can see, it was worth the wait. No result less than the evidence of a complete waste of several man years of work would have sufficed. The bollards that are now in place were not part of the plan. To the planners, it may have seemed that narrowing the street would prevent the delivery vans from using that appealing ‘SLOW’ car space but it became clear early on that what they had done was create a space on the footpath that appealed even more to the delivery vans. So up came the bricks and in went the bollards.

Ironmonger Lane is part of ancient London, with a 2000 year old Roman road lying beneath. It has been called Ironmonger Lane for at least 800 years. It is one of the ribs that spur off from the spine of Cheapside (’cheap’ is Saxon for ‘market’) along with Bread St, Wood St, Milk St, and Honey Lane before Cheapside turns into Poultry. Ironmongers were one of the “Twelve Great Companies” that became London in cooperation with the Mercers, Grocers, Fishmongers, Drapers, Goldsmiths, Skinners, Merchant Taylors, Haberdashers, Salters, Vintners, and Clothworkers. The history and events that occured at this crux of a small street in London over the passage of hundreds of years I can only imagine. 900 hundreds ago England’s “2nd worst briton for the last 1000 years” Thomas a Beckett was born at the end of the Lane.

Peter Ackroyd, that great biographer of London, wrote several years ago that Ironmonger Lane has “had the same width for almost 355 years. That width was and is 14 feet, originally sufficient to allow two carts to pass each other without hindrance or blockage. It is another aspect of this continuous London history that its structure can accommodate itself to quite different modes of transport”. And so it has come to be that the 14 feet wide section lasted just 358 years, perhaps now wide enough for two mopeds to speed by one another.

After 14 weeks of gradual construction, much of the new grey bricked lane is already oil splattered and chipped at one end. How long until the next street improvement project, I wonder?

(As always, 4x5 Polaroid 55 scanned negative shot on 4x5 pinhole camera).

A 4x5″ tintype of Millennium Bridge with St Paul’s in the background. As this is an in-camera ferrotype, the image is reversed left to right. The camera used, if you are interested in that sort of thing, is a hacked up Polaroid 800 from the late 1950s fitted with lens and bellows of a Polaroid 110 from the early 1960s, open backed to put a 4x5 (or whatever) in place.

Something a little different today and work in progress - I’ve been playing with some old processes lately. This is a 4x5″ tintype/ferrotype similar to how they did it in the 1870s. The substrate is japanned metal. It is sensitised by concocting then pouring a runny emulsion over the substrate. Equivalent film speed is approx 1/2 (one half) ISO (ordinary ‘film’ or digital is ISO100-400). The plate is developed and fixed much like traditional paper processes. It then has to be varnished/lacquered to protect. In case it isn’t obvious, the emulsion is actually a negative, but if you place a negative against a black background it becomes positive.

It is a fiddly process fraught with error and surprise. The finished product is somewhat three dimensional and changes colour depending on light, the blues you see here are more often black. You can do the process in the darkroom at print time but I am doing in-camera tintypes so they are one of a kind objects. I kinda like the result and am considering a project using the technique.

The Barbican, London. Yesterday.

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