LIP Central April 2026 Meeting – LIP Satellite Groups

Featured image © Mike Coleman

The April meeting of LIP Central was held on the 8^th at Lumen, Bloomsbury, with the theme of “Green”.

Mike Coleman welcomes the arrival of spring when he can spend time in his back garden, or at Chelsea Physic Garden, using his macro lens to photograph insects, leaves and lichen. The rich textures of green and brown, sometimes illuminated by flash, take us into a fascinating miniature world.

Margaret Marks presented an eclectic selection of images, one featuring the sign for Green Park Station and another the concourse of Oval Station which featured cricketers in white on a sea of green tiles. The green umbrella she showed was not to keep off the rain but to catch insects from a shaken tree.

Pauline Moon’s images ranged from the forest of Dean (where the extraordinary woodland floor, created by a collapsed cave system, is said to have inspired Tolkien) to scenes of traditional Romanian agriculture with their traditional haystacks reminiscent of Monet.

Edey Templeton loves techniques such as double exposure and ICM (Intentional Camera Movement), presenting a fascinating selection of abstracted images in subtle shades of green, her final image being an abstract pattern of snail trials.

Julian Sainsbury’s images reflect his fascination with pattern, form and repetition. His urban photographs displaying strong horizontal bands of colour – green and its complementary, orange – framed by a grey fence and a grey sky. At the junction between the River Lee and the Grand Canal, the green slime on the surface of the water contrast boldly with the red hoarding. In a gentler mood, his use of ICM captured fluid shades.

Using natural light in his kitchen and a lightbox, Simon Butcher has taken everyday objects and vegetables to produce intriguing patterns. Taking an excellent 30 second exposure of the wonderful Northern Lights in Finland was such a demanding technical exercise that Simon hardly had time to look up to see the lights for himself.

The green in Nusse Belton’s images was entirely from nature: green vegetables, weeds in flowing water, and raindrops on marrows. The peas in her photograph were so perfectly ordered within the pod that it looked as if they had been placed there by some cosmic designer.

Chloë Sastry is fascinated by Kensal Green cemetery, where she listens to birdsong and watches insects crawling out from fissures and laminations in the stone. The permanence of the stone contrasts with the transience of nature, the seed heads symbolically promise hope and renewal of life. Her deliberately blurred images echo the liminal transition between life and death.

Bjanca Kadic highlights human intervention: an old-fashioned radio, the entrance doors to a church in Brazil and the crumbling elegance of Cuba’s historic buildings. She deliberately chooses red to complement the green and many of her images feature strong, deep shadows.

Prodeepta Das lives near Epping Forest where foxes are frequently observed – usually alive, here photographed against a green fence, or occasionally as roadkill! Covid “Keep your distance Signs”, feature amusing thought bubbles and a graffiti message, partially obscured by a female silhouette, mysteriously reads “Don’t mess with ……”.

Austin Guest’s images from a walk through West London include the advertisement sign for a circus and the underside of Hammersmith Bridge. Riverside closeups, the green of the Italian flag stripes at an Italian restaurant and the skin of a ripening papaya on a market stall complete the series.

Personal projects:

Sue Czapska aims to reflect her own personal experiences through photography, noting how humanity can be wise & creative, but also intensely destructive. She doubts whether you can have one without the other. Her photographs show disused buildings and the patina on a rusty piece of corrugated iron.

Eve Millner is taking a series of 20 portraits on behalf of the charity “Refugees at Home”. She asks all participant to include a tea tray but is still searching for a further way to unify the set of images. Her aim is to celebrate the diversity and the warmth of the hosts.

Following on from her studies at City Lit, Soraya Cerio is starting a project to explore “solitude”. The meeting explored some of the positive aspects of being alone and debated whether isolation is the same as solitude, and which has the more positive meaning.

Liv Harris’ work is titled “in the twilight and when the sky is clouded” in which she takes some of the 500 glass negatives from her family’s archive and explores the materiality of these pieces. She displayed a series of images on handmade paper, using silver gelatin, some using plant-based developers. She says that these processes allow her to spend time with each individual photograph, and to value the ephemeral nature of life.

The next meeting will take place at the usual Lumen venue on Wednesday, 13th May, when members can present their current personal projects and receive feedback.