Charles Dickens described it as “a deadly sewer” that “ebbed and flowed, in the place of a fine fresh river”, while TS Eliot imagined it as a “brown god – sullen, untamed and intractable”. For its biographer, Peter Ackroyd, it represented “an escape from the world”. The river Thames, as the documentary photographer Chloe Dewe Mathews notes, “is many things to many people”. Her new series, Thames Log, is the result of five years spent wandering the course of England’s longest river, “documenting encounters and happenings” from its source in rural Gloucester to its mouth in the Thames estuary near Southend-on-Sea.
Dewe Mathews’s images of the Thames are, among other things, a contemporary inventory of the often surprising ways in which ordinary people use the river, from the mudlarks who scour its banks for Roman coins to the Hindus who gather there in devotion to Ganesh as they would gather at the Ganges. “I started thinking about the Thames when I finished a project about the Caspian Sea back in 2011,” she says. “I’d just returned from a place where people have a complex ritual relationship to water, whether through their religious beliefs or in terms of the health-giving powers they attribute to it, and it seemed to me that most people in London seemed hardly aware of the river. I thought, ‘Why does nothing mysterious and ritualistic happen on the river in homogenised England?’ – but I soon realised I was mistaken.”
The more she explored the river, the more she uncovered. In the countryside near Oxford, she encountered a trio of female pagan revellers who dance by the river amid swirling trails of incense smoke. At Tilbury, she befriended a group of ship-spotters, who log the vessels that pass through the docks. On London Bridge, she photographed rush-hour commuters walking to work in the shadow of the Shard, and an annual Anglican procession that culminates there with a wooden cross being thrown into the river. At Southend, where the river joins the sea, she found white-robed members of an African Pentecostal church performing full-immersion baptisms, and, in leafy Richmond, witnessed a busload of Hindu devotees from Dollis Hill watch a Ganesh idol being submerged in the waters.
Dewe Mathews is best known for ambitious documentary projects that can take years of preparation. For Caspian, she walked around the Caspian Sea, through Azerbaijan, Iran, Kazakhstan, Russia, and Turkmenistan. In 2014, her series Shot at Dawn – in which she photographed the sites across France and Belgium where deserters were executed during the first world war – was included in the Conflict, Time, Photography exhibition at Tate Modern. Thames Log is a more personal journey along a river that ran by her childhood home in Hammersmith and that she crossed every day on her way to school.
“As a Londoner, my interest is really in the ordinary people who engage with the river rather than well-known events like the Oxford-Cambridge boat race or Henley Regatta, not least because they have been photographed so much. Most of what I photographed came from chatting to local people who live along the river.”
The title of the series, Thames Log, came from the ship spotters at Tilbury, who “sit all day logging the continual stream of vessels passing through”. Like many who use the river, they keep a constant eye on the weather and on tide timetables – the Thames is tidal below Teddington Lock and high tide readings are recorded at London Bridge and posted online by the Port of London Authority. “I monitored the weather and the tide timetables every day when I was working,” says Dewe Mathews, “and when I exhibit the photographs, they have a log underneath showing the weather and the high and low water readings on that day.”
“The river is the oldest thing in London and it changes not at all, writes Ackroyd in Thames. But people’s relationship to it changes constantly, just as the city and the countryside around it change. “People told me that they often saw coconut shells on the water and these turned out to be remnants of the Hindu ceremonies conducted on the river,” says Dewe Mathews. “I photographed a brightly coloured Hindu idol that had been washed up in Shoeburyness after 2,000 people had attended a ceremony for the elephant god. These are recent developments. The river is a constant but now it seems to be attracting people who see it as a mysterious presence or maybe as an antidote to the increasingly homogenised city. Their motivations are diverse, but all of them are drawn to the water’s edge by their fascination with the river.”
A selection of photographs from Thames Log by Chloe Dewe Mathews will be shown at Tilbury Cruise Terminal, Essex, as part of Estuary, a new arts biennial
