Image © Anna Lerner

We warmly welcomed two new members for Central group – Chris Murray and Joanna Furniss,
which brought the total attendance to 19.
There had been much thumbing through dictionaries and scratching of heads prior to this
meeting with its theme of ‘Flux’. Eight brave souls took on the challenge, and 3 others
chose to present ongoing personal projects for the group’s feedback.

Capturing people in a state of flux, Janey Nabney showed us a multi-layered view from the
top deck of a London bus, where we can see at the same time the direction in which we are
travelling, and – in the reflections – the direction from which we have come. Dorota Boisot
also captured people in movement while travelling on a canal boat in Amsterdam as well as
some mesmeric close-ups of the swirling water with its fractured reflections of building.
Anthony Tyley presented several images showing the effect of laser lights on body surfaces
in a disco, as well as a very moving capture of the moment a young couple take their
wedding vows, when their lives are changed forever in an instant.

Water in its various states was a very popular subject. Austin Guest had some of us feeling
very seasick with his splendid images of a tidal flows meeting in Norway, and the bubbling,
swirling flow of a stream over a small weir in St Albans. He and Tony Nichols also focused
on the millennia of flux represented in the gorgeous geology of rock formations. Anna
Lerner told us the poignant story of a dying fish going, going and then finally gone over the
edge of another weir, while Tony by turns invigorated us with a boiling cauldron of water in
a swollen river where we all agreed we could almost hear the thunderous crashing of the
flow, and then calmed us down with an ethereal sepia-toned sunset over the sea in Wales.
Yas Crawford also heightened our senses with the vivid, lurid reds of ‘haemodynamics’ –
blood flow to you and me! Taking archival laboratory images, Yas stretched them to give a
real sense of flow, but also included elements of landscape such as tree roots to convey the
idea of blood flow to less scientifically-minded viewers.

ICM proved a popular technique with which to convey the impression of ‘a state of
constant movement’, as seen particularly in Edey Templeton’s ironically beautiful images of
barbed wire, and her enigmatic and impressionistic trees.

Three ongoing special projects were each as stimulating as they were different. Heather
Martin continued to focus her kind and gently humorous eye on the details she found on
well-trodden paths and familiar local scenes. Ingrid Newton was in the process of
developing a fascinating project as only 1 of a few photographers in the Newlyn Society of Artists
in Cornwall, responding to work created by former members of the Society. Ingrid took the
paintings of Laura Knight as her inspiration. Knight depicted women within seascapes
around 1917, singly or in pairs all looking out to sea, and Ingrid experimented with layered
images, superimposing portraits of women photographed from behind onto coastal landscapes. The
resulting effect is one of fragility, wistfulness, and a yearning to see into the future. Steve
Jones took his Sony digital infra-red-enabled camera on a photo walk across Swanscombe
Marshes with the Crossing Lines group. The resulting images of this hybrid edgeland with its
mournful juxtapostions of nature and manmade constructs were extremely emotive. Steve
challenged us to make sense of landscape in a different way, and the pervading sentiment
from this set was that of a desolate, frozen, post-apolcalyptic world.
Eve Milner

Yas Crawford

Edith Templeton

Anna Lerner

Steve Jones

Janet Nabney

Austin Guest

Ingrid Newton