LIP Central May 2026 Meeting – LIP Satellite Groups

Featured image © Soraya Cerio

The May meeting of LIP Central London Group was dedicated to project critiques and was attended by 15 members, eight of whom showed work.

Sue Czapska’s project on mist and clouds was heavily influenced by Rothko’s abstract paintings with horizontal bands of colour which balanced colours and tones to create a mystery. Her photos worked in a similar way using stormy skies or mist at sunset, over land and sea to create the feel of a watercolour wash. In her latest images she also created ethereal, panoramic format cloudscapes, negatives of which looked like Japanese prints of mountain ranges.

Simon Zebu showed a project which had been 24 years in the making. He habitually visited the same bench on Hampstead Heath as part of a daily cycle ride and had taken 2500 images www.thebenchshots.co.uk . The different seasons, vegetation, lighting, weather, and passing birds, animals and people created a startling variety of compositions at a single location. Simon even managed to persuade us that one image captured a ghost (he had discounted lens flare etc), maybe of the person the bench had been dedicated to as it happened to be their birthday.

Soraya Cerio took Daido Moriyama’s style as an inspiration for her flaneur-like street photography project around Covent Garden and Soho for International Women’s Day. She found a liberating creativity in shooting intuitively without looking at the viewfinder. The images were skewed, out of focus and lacking formal composition yet her edit from 700 photos felt very fresh and generated real interest and impact.

Jamie Bolt presented his experiments in monochrome nature photography. The layers of trees or leaves rendered in a chiaroscuro like contrast highlighted their texture and forms, evoking the notion that they might be carved in stone or fossilised.

Mark Friend’s street photography project intentionally avoided becoming a record of place and time. He composed scenes in camera but ensured they were out of focus to create a painterly rendering and ambiguity which engages viewers in a new way.

Jim Paterson showed images he had taken 65 years ago as a child in Venezuela. They showed the expat life of his family through a child’s eye. The images evoked a different era with historical content and the patina of age, being black and white, small, faded, grainy, and scratched. Jim finalised this project as a family photobook.

Andrew Boxer’s project was inspired by the industrial photography of John Kippin. He used image stitching to create high resolution panoramas of dilapidated industrial buildings and structures around Tilbury. Many of them were windows into a fading past, but some collided with the present when graffitied with bold coloured artist tags.

Austin Guest took a novel approach during a landscape photography workshop in Scotland. He used in-camera double exposures to combine wide angle vistas with well-defined close details to create colourful and semi-imaginary landscapes with abstract elements. These challenged the viewer to identify which elements were which, and to perceive new shapes within their mind’s eye.

The next group meeting will be on Wednesday, 10^th June, when the theme will be ‘Water’.