You open After London, the latest book by photographer Simon Roberts, and you rub your eyes. The images are all madly out of focus, hazy smudges of colour and form. But you make out, in the end, the familiar landmarks of the city: tower bridge, the gherkin, Battersea Power Station, and the Thames.
Indeed, there is a lot of blurry water in these mesmerising pictures. This is undoubtedly the point, as this handsome dystopian volume figures a city that has been altered by the climate crisis. The title is borrowed from a prescient 1885 novel by Richard Jefferies which depicts London after it has been drowned by an unspecified natural disaster.
By manipulating focus, Roberts has hit on an ingenious way of inviting us to imagine in visual form what our familiar surroundings will become, denuded of the familiar thrum of street life. Are the buildings dissolved before our eyes even available for human use? On one page St Paul’s Cathedral looks like it is lying in a field; on another a large green branch nearly obscures the view of a bridge.
Nature is clearly getting her own back in this photographic version of ‘clifi’, and the effect is what Roberts describes as “a quiet foreboding, as if the city were holding its breath”.
There is huge beauty in these images, with their luminosity and subtle colour variations. At the same time, After London conjures extreme unease, for the soft and dreamy world we see is draped around a central absence: us.
After London by Simon Roberts is published by Hoxton Mini Press. ISBN: 978-1-917719-10-0; RRP: £35.00.
