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Residents of the streets of East London are captured with startling clarity by the enigmatic C A Mathew. The purpose of the photographs remains unknown, but on the morning of Saturday 20th April, 1912, our photographer walked the short distance from Liverpool Street Station into the heart of Spitalfields, taking his camera with him.
In contrast to the more formal, posed photographs of the time viewers may be more familiar with, these photographs engage vividly with a modern audience, who see the people, the streets and the everyday details, just as C A Mathew himself would have seen them.
Mathew lived in Brightlingsea in Essex, having only begun taking photographs a year before these images were made, he passed away 4 short years later in 1916 leaving this series of images that in the words of the Gentle Author of Spitalfields Life are ‘the most vivid evocation we have of Spitalfields at this time.’
The photographs were found a few years ago packed into a cardboard box in the archives of the Bishopsgate Institute where they had evidently been for at least 60 years, but there are no records of how they came to be there.
Details of the exhibition can be found here, and is open by appointment from Monday to Friday, and all day Saturday and Sunday, from 6 March -25 April.
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On 4 March information about C A Mathew was updated on Spitalfields Life. He died in 1924, a photographer to the end. It is unlikely he began taking photographs in 1911 but his professional life as a self employed photographer had certainly started by that year.
There is also strong evidence that the photographs were taken as surveying photographs.
I refer you to the two relevant articles in Spitalfields Life:
http://spitalfieldslife.com/2014/03/04/in-search-of-c-a-mathew/
http://spitalfieldslife.com/2014/03/06/upon-the-subject-of-c-a-math...
Vicky Stewart
Victoria and Albert Museum's photography collection
National Science and Media Museum
RPS Journal 1853-2012 online and searchable
Photographic History Research Centre, Leicester
Birkbeck History and Theory of Photography Research Centre
William Henry Fox Talbot Catalogue Raisonné
British Photography. The Hyman Collection
The Press Photo History Project Mapping the photo agencies and photographers of Fleet Street and the UK
The correspondence of William Henry Fox Talbot
Historic England Archive
UAL Photography and Photography and the Archive Research Centre
Royal Photographic Society's Historical Group
www.londonstereo.com London Stereoscopic Company / T. R. Williams
www.earlyphotography.co.uk British camera makers and companies
Fox Talbot Museum, Lacock.
National Portrait Gallery, London
http://www.freewebs.com/jb3d/
Alfred Seaman and the Photographic Convention
Frederick Scott Archer
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