- Messages
- 9,001
- Name
- Rob Telford
- Edit My Images
- No
This is probably more a theme than a project, but I've been finding myself returning to it more and more over the last few months.
As some of you may be aware, I'm something of an admirer of Eugène Atget. For those that aren't familiar, he was a photographer who documented the changing face of Paris at the end of the 19th century and into the early 20th, with a particular emphasis on architectural details street scenes (but rarely people). He sold prints of his photographs to artists, theatre designers and anyone else looking for reference material.
Throughout his career, Atget took photographs of trees. They seem to hold a particular fascination for him, often returning to the same trees at different seasons or revisiting them years later. I had come to him via his Parisian city photos, which had a particular resonance with my own photography of London, but some of his images of trees began to be of more interest to me.
There is a series of his photographs of Notre Dame where the trunk of a tree passes right through the frame, partially obscuring the cathedral. As a compositional choice, this was curious; superimposing a natural figure upon a man made ground. In many of his other photographs, trees break almost unexpectedly into the frame from its edges. Elsewhere, he made studies, or perhaps even portraits of trees, especially in the Parc de Saint-Cloud to the west of Paris.
I tried to take on board some of those ideas into my own photographs of trees, mostly around central London.
It took me a while to put the pieces together in my head. Some of them are about how we encounter trees in town - they are used to mark out spaces, or fill gaps. We walk around them, stack things against them. We might look up occasionally, but often we only see the trunk of a tree that we are passing at eye level as we go about our lives. Others are more directly inspired by Atget.
There's a full set on Flickr, but here's a few.
1.
Bloomsbury Plane by Rob Telford, on Flickr
2.
33 Percy Street by Rob Telford, on Flickr
3.
Tree: Lincoln's Inn Fields by Rob Telford, on Flickr
4.
Wood for the Trees by Rob Telford, on Flickr
5.
Wild Court by Rob Telford, on Flickr
6.
Brown Brogues by Rob Telford, on Flickr
7.
Cleaning Up by Rob Telford, on Flickr
8.
Central St Giles by Rob Telford, on Flickr
As some of you may be aware, I'm something of an admirer of Eugène Atget. For those that aren't familiar, he was a photographer who documented the changing face of Paris at the end of the 19th century and into the early 20th, with a particular emphasis on architectural details street scenes (but rarely people). He sold prints of his photographs to artists, theatre designers and anyone else looking for reference material.
Throughout his career, Atget took photographs of trees. They seem to hold a particular fascination for him, often returning to the same trees at different seasons or revisiting them years later. I had come to him via his Parisian city photos, which had a particular resonance with my own photography of London, but some of his images of trees began to be of more interest to me.
There is a series of his photographs of Notre Dame where the trunk of a tree passes right through the frame, partially obscuring the cathedral. As a compositional choice, this was curious; superimposing a natural figure upon a man made ground. In many of his other photographs, trees break almost unexpectedly into the frame from its edges. Elsewhere, he made studies, or perhaps even portraits of trees, especially in the Parc de Saint-Cloud to the west of Paris.
I tried to take on board some of those ideas into my own photographs of trees, mostly around central London.
It took me a while to put the pieces together in my head. Some of them are about how we encounter trees in town - they are used to mark out spaces, or fill gaps. We walk around them, stack things against them. We might look up occasionally, but often we only see the trunk of a tree that we are passing at eye level as we go about our lives. Others are more directly inspired by Atget.
There's a full set on Flickr, but here's a few.
1.
Bloomsbury Plane by Rob Telford, on Flickr
2.
33 Percy Street by Rob Telford, on Flickr
3.
Tree: Lincoln's Inn Fields by Rob Telford, on Flickr
4.
Wood for the Trees by Rob Telford, on Flickr
5.
Wild Court by Rob Telford, on Flickr
6.
Brown Brogues by Rob Telford, on Flickr
7.
Cleaning Up by Rob Telford, on Flickr
8.
Central St Giles by Rob Telford, on Flickr
Last edited:
