John Davies was commissioned by the Museum of London in 2001 to make 26 images of the capital’s arterial roads. Six large prints were exhibited at the Museum in 2013 – St Pancras, Mansion House, Marble Arch, the Hammersmith Ark, a north Greenwich gas holder, Elephant and Castle.
As well as being glorious pictures in their own right, they provide an intense scrutiny of the urban landscape. Davies’ photography embraces the complexity of the city with visual articulacy and open-mindedness, allowing us to read the landscape and discern the causes and effects of urbanism on local places. As Michael Wood says in A Green and Pleasant Land, ‘Each of John’s pictures tells a packed story. Tales of change, cycles of destruction and rebirth’.
In this way Davies’ photographs act as a means of visual literacy, by which we question the use and development of urban space. His photographs, explicitly about urban form, invite urban analysis. Most commentary on urban landscape is historical – sequences of dates, what has been lost, but commentary is rarely spatial – reasons for locations, juxtapositions, origins and destinations of routes, fronts and backs, function of spaces; Davies enables this.
The commission marked ten years of the congestion charge; more significant however is that the pictures are shown ten years after the 2002 publication of the London Plan by the new mayor and GLA, identifying key growth areas, including the Elephant & Castle.
Despite being entitled Highways, It is soon evident that the real content of these photographs is the local places the big roads animate or devastate. Davies’ photographs are a kind of land use mapping, telling us something about the location and life of a place – housing, parks, shops, road turnings, depot, car park, service yard; either ordered and stable, or crashed together, provisional, messy. The topographic photograph gives all content equal attention, both grand and bland; therefore a shed on a terrace roof top claims the same status as Erskine’s Ark; and the ephemeral hand written signs, street stalls, burger van, wear and tear become as significant as the architecture.
A photograph always only shows part of the urban whole – we don’t see the spatial connections beyond the frame. We don’t see what’s hidden within the frame – the Heygate estate behind the Elephant shopping centre, Somerstown behind St Pancras. The meaning of all the six exhibited images revolves around invisible underground functions – major tube interchanges, a river tunnel, Park Lane car park. And of course, in a photograph, the vociferous campaigning around these places is unheard.
Inferred connections enable us to partly construct the wider city morphology, helped by Davies’ elevated vantage points. And we can also infer the territorial claims made by City institutions, the Crown estate, transport policy, housing regeneration politics, spatial funding, property investors. Davies offers the chance to see, piece together and decipher the city.
Reading urban photographs 