1/25/2024 0 Comments Galleried inns![]() Even as the Society came to photograph the building, its inhabitants were being moved out. The Oxford Arms, for example, had been a tenement for about seven years when it was slated for demolition. This choice foregrounds certain aspects of history while eliding others. (The photographs’ long exposures meant that “you wouldn’t be able to get a candid shot of someone, a kid outside a doorway, if you didn’t say, ‘Hey kid, stand still,’” Ramalingam says.) Humans are rarely present, and those that are there were almost certainly posed, to provide scale. The Society called these buildings “relics,” and the photographs treat them as such. It looks incredibly modern.”Įqually important, Ramalingam points out, is what Marks chose not to highlight. You see this view of intersecting planes-this series of angles that slices through the alley. “The photographer has climbed up to what must have been a really awkward perch, and is taking looking down. “It’s actually of an alley behind the church,” she says. A mansion on Leadenhall Street, depicted in photo 20, once had “a grand staircase,” cedar-paneled floors, and “decorations … of a very sumptuous character.” The poet Ben Jonson, he writes, may have laid some of the bricks at Lincoln’s Inn-the subject of photo 12. His texts are filled with references to royalty and famous people, along with literature, legends, and nursery rhymes. While later historic preservation projects were more encyclopedic, Marks put his energy specifically towards buildings that he thought “served as important records of national character,” Ramalingam says. (Despite its name, there’s no evidence the Society ever met up in real life, or had any true members besides Marks.) Still, Marks ran the show, choosing which buildings to focus on, and particular details to highlight. “The project became much bigger than he originally intended,” says Chitra Ramalingam, the Assistant Curator of Photography at the Yale Center for British Art, which exhibited SPROL’s photographs in 2016.
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