Yale Center for British Art Photo
“The Oxford Arms, Warwick Lane,” by Alfred and John Bool, 1875.
By the late 1800s, when railroads had become the dominant transportation mode, medieval coaching inns in London — hubs for horse-borne travelers like in the Canterbury Tales — were all but extinct, and the survivors were facing the wrecking ball.
In rushed the first wave of documentary photographers with the glorious illusion that the past, or at least its spirit, might be preserved in an image.
You can decide if they succeeded with a tour of the tiny but moving one-room exhibition “Art in Focus: Relics of Old London,” which runs through Aug. 14 on the second floor of the recently reopened Yale Center for British Art (YCBA).
Our Elm City is not London, but the past still runs deep enough here — especially as new developments abound — to take a lesson from these Victorian documentarians: If you’re going to lose historic buildings and neighborhoods, at least make a systematic and, preferably, artful record of what is to be lost.
In 1875 Alfred Marks, an antiquarian scholar whose father was in the horse and carriage business, founded the Society for Photographing Relics of Old London. He corralled commercial photographers Alfred and John Bool and Henry and Thomas Dixon to capture coaching inns, along with old houses and old lanes in images and text.
They also defended endangered buildings, most of which they lost.
But the eerie, indigo-colored de-peopled images, all taken on glass plate negatives, were richly published.
These dreamy, melancholy urban vistas infuse the YCBA’s exhibition space — already museum-quiet — with a deep stillness of the past trying to speak.
“Old Houses, Aldgate,” by Henry and Thomas James Dixon, 1883.
Who knew there was a school, in this image, where you would go to learn how to ride a bicycle? And look, nearby is a sewing machine advertisement, of a familiar brand. Along the roadway horses are pulling a heavy wagon; the clip-clopping, neighing, shouting, cursing, and hello-ing must have been boisterous and omnipresent.
Allan Appel Photo
The team of Yale students who researched, organized, and mounted the exhibition deserve high praise for showing, telling, and evoking so much in such a small space.
It’s also more than fitting that this show debuts as part of the reopening of the Yale Center for British Art, after a year and a half of restoring and conserving its own historic building, by famed architect Louis Kahn, for future generations.
Some of the images are street level and intimate enough that you want to put your face closer. Others are photographed from elevations, so you get a sense of the impermanence of the old wooden Tudor structures. The meant-to-survive buildings of stone, such as Chrisopher Wren’s St. Paul’s Cathedral, emerge in the background.
The contrast is deliberate. These photographers and their leader Marks — as is clear in his commentaries, readable in the vitrine in the center of the room — are asking profound questions about what is worth remembering. Do not these inns, where Chaucer’s characters told their stories, or where Alexander Pope or Dr. Johnson held forth, or where hundreds of thousands of now nameless travelers, hostlers, wagon drivers, serving girls, and stable boys rested, deserve some sort of continuance?
“Great St. Helen’s,” by Henry and Thomas James Dixon, 1886.
What I came away with most, from the photographs and the accompanying text, is that these photographers were documenting not only half-timbered facades, signage, and urban crossroads soon to be obliterated for who knows what. They were also capturing their own personal memories of these places and infusing that into their picture-making. That is what renders these images powerful, and the story they show tells a cautionary one for us today.
