To photograph the rise of London’s towers is to engage with the city as it breathes, a body of mass and light, steel and concrete. The scaffolded skyline is no abstraction, but a precarious line of tube, line and interstice, a rough geometry tracing future outcomes.
Each morning begins with a climb: thick-soled boots, reluctant and unforgiving; hi-vis layers trapping a clammy, internal humidity; the dull clang of a helmet knocked against the shoulder-slung tripod. Fingers numb. The wind finds every seam between layers, it presses against your back with intent. There are days when “photographer” doesn’t feel like the wisest choice.
The camera is no friend to haste. An 8×10 view camera is a slow, deliberate creature. Lifting it chest-high through tight scaffold frames, angling it over stairwells and voids, balancing it on temporary barriers, it is both companion and adversary.
And all the while, the light moves.
You must be ready before it disappears, before the steel turns dull and the concrete loses contrast. There is no forgiveness for hesitation.
But here’s the thing: there is such beauty in this ordeal. The structure reveals its form. Columns align, diagrams of force. Floorplates float in anticipation of new density. There’s a rhythm to everything. Each surface holds its own vocabulary: rough, brushed, matte, scored, reflective. Materials speak in tone, in shade, in weight.
It’s all theatre. A sequence of elegant studies, steel against sky, concrete against mist, the figures of construction workers straining as panels are winched in from above.
There’s much to do, and still no time.
I visualise in monochrome always “Previsualisation,” insisted Maestro Adams. Tones imagined before exposure, lines already in the mind’s eye. Black and white does not reduce; it distills. It takes the grit, the rawness, the awkwardness of this vertical terrain, and gives it form. All Clarified. All Revealed.
Later, in the darkroom, the contact print emerges, full frame, edge to edge. The negative, so large, so tactile, a full 8×10″: magnificent. Always a thing of wonder. It offers a kind of truth that only hard-won images possess. No cropping, no corrections. Just the scene, as it stood, seen through dust and discomfort, fogged breath, aching back, and the endless physical negotiation of presence.
This is not recording. Nothing is being taken. The camera collaborates. It insists on effort. You are making something, and that making must cost you something, that’s the deal, the exchange.
And when it works, when that rare alignment of structure, of light, of intention is caught, it is the purest satisfaction. You feel it. The negative whispers it to you as it converts photons into silver halides.
Arthur C. Clarke once said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
Here is his indisputable proof.
6 Bevis Marks AXA | MGPA | Core Fletcher Priest Architects
