This page is dedicated to recollections and photos of the early years of Central London Group. Some of these are 15 years old and do not claim to be totally reliable. If you are able to contribute further content please contact Jan Cylwik.
Hugh Look, the instigator of Central London group, has written his account of its early history:
Jan Cylwik has asked me to sketch out the early history of LIP’s Central London group, why and how it came into being. My ADHD- driven memory is poor, so some of this may not be very accurate. I’ve had helpful emails from other people but any errors and omissions are all my fault.
I can’t put an exact date to the origin of the Central Group, but it was sometime in the summer of 2010. I’d not long joined LIP as I wanted to take photography more seriously and was beginning to have some ideas about direction. I joined because I read Virginia Khuri’s ideas for LIP itself which appealed much more than the technically-oriented meetings that were what I’d found up until then (https://londonphotography.org.uk/history.php). One of the first LIP workshops I went to was a two-parter on working in series, led by Paul Hill and held in the basement of St James’s church in Piccadilly. It was very productive for me and helped to convince me that I benefitted a lot from being around other photographers who were exploring what to do and where to go with their work.
Thus I wanted to get involved with something on a more regular basis. Lysa and I had moved from Greenwich to Guildford a couple of years before and although I was working in central London, most of the existing satellite groups weren’t very convenient and timing would mean either hanging around for a couple of hours after work or coming back into town. I was thinking about this during a break when I realised that I couldn’t be the only person in this position and there might well be others who would like to come to an early evening meeting in central London after work and before going home. It really was as simplistic as that and once the idea had occurred to me it really wouldn’t go away.
One major influence was the chance to talk it over with another of the workshop participants, the late Ariadne van de Ven who was sceptical but nevertheless supportive, and turned into a pillar of the group when it started up. We agreed about the ethos for a group: it should be about the why and not the how, and encourage thoughtful and honest comments on the work shown. Also at the workshop was an LIP committee member, Tim Crowe, who thought the idea was interesting and encouraged me to put it to the committee to gather some support.
It took me a couple of months to get round to doing anything about it, as my work was going through a particularly torrid phase, but I finally contracted the LIP committee; the committee was happy to support the idea if I could make it work, and included a call for interest in a newsletter.I can’t find the first call for interest that went out to LIP members, but the first announcement of a meeting is still on the LIP website: https://satellite.londonphotography.org.uk/ 2010/09/10/new-satellite-group-in-central-london/. How we came to find The Art Workers’ Guild as a venue was a result of my unrelenting nosiness. One day on the train up to town I sat opposite someone editing minutes on headed paper for the Berlioz Society. A friend was at the time the Chair of the Elgar Society, so it caught my eye. I’m quite good at reading upside down, and I noticed that the venue for their meeting: The Art Workers’ Guild. I’d never heard of it but it sounded interesting and at least partly relevant to a photography group. Some research showed that it had smallish room for hire and was in a very handy location, so I went to see it and meet the manager, Elspeth. And that was it. From then until the pandemic, it was our venue. It was hospitable, comfortable, and reasonably affordable.
The first meeting was mostly taken up with deciding what we wanted to be and how it was going to work, and because I liked splitting large meetings into syndicate discussions (mainly because it makes it easier for quieter people to get their voices heard) I was worried that there might not be much of a consensus. Fortunately it wasn’t a problem, mostly because LIP itself had a strong ethos that its members liked, and the Central London group was clearly going to follow the same path.
The core group that took on tasks and came back after the first meeting included Sue Czapska (see her recollections below), Ingrid Newton, Ariadne van de Ven (much missed), Krystina Stimakovits, Brendan Delaney, Peter Luck and Edey Templeton. This small group became the core of the membership, and it wouldn’t have lasted beyond a couple of meetings without their various talents, energy and generosity. Later other people got involved, including Jan Cylwik, now the group’s excellent coordinator.
The photography shown and discussed was deeply eclectic, ranging from thoughtful urban landscapes, through travel and documentary to experiments with form and content. We started to theme the meetings quite early on, but the themes themselves were baggy enough to continue to include all kinds of work. We inspired one another, and for myself I think I went from being pretty terrible to being OK on a good day–because I was seeing not just great photography in books, but great photography made by living people I could talk to and who were generous with their ideas and their help. We argued about our enthusiasms for other photographers at meetings and in the pub afterwards.
It wasn’t long before someone suggested we should have our own exhibition, and in 2012 we held our first dedicated show at the Mile End Art Pavilion. Putting together the first show, it felt at times as if we were hanging on by our fingernails, but we made it and the opening was a proud moment. A couple of years later we moved to the Espacio gallery in Shoreditch, and that kicked it up another notch. (See exhibition photo appended to this page).
Sue Czapska, one of the founding members, has contributed her own memories which round out Hugh Look’s account:
Hi Hugh,
First I’d like to thank you for starting Central LIP which to this day I enjoy.
As one of the two remaining original members I feel I ought to be able to help with recollections but am not sure how useful I can be.
I remember our very first meeting which you called to discuss starting the group. There were about 25 people and we divided into groups of three or four. I was with Jo Stapleton, who recognised me as she had lived in the same house some years earlier, and Ingrid. Each group discussed suggested questions and then fed back to the whole group.
The structure for meetings was readily agreed, following your suggestion of all meetings being for the showing and discussion of photos. We used the second meeting to introduce ourselves by each showing some of our work and talking about it. After that we commenced the structure which remains basically the same today.
Everything was very well organised with several of us on the committee to organise everything.
The choice of The Art Workers Guild in Queens Square gave us all we needed with Elspeth, the caretaker, always very helpful. She provided a projector, refreshments, and when I showed videos with audio I just had to phone her to let her know to provide the projector with sound for that. In those early days she used also to put out the chairs for us in the pattern we requested.
I often took the role of projectionist which in effect meant also chairing. I found facilitating the group easy because of my job, but getting the images from USB sticks could be a challenge as some folk would bring strange file types. And once I got taken aside by two members for being too nice to a member who seemed to want to talk too much about her feelings.
There were a few times in the early days when it looked as if LIP Central group might disappear. I remember once, in the first or second year, I was projecting / chairing a meeting, and only two people turned up. One was a new person come to see what we were like! and the other, a committee member, said she had no money at all with her. I paid the whole £65 for that evening!
Normally we collected the rent on the evening dividing it between whoever attended.
I also sometimes took that role collecting and handing the money to Elspeth in the break. This involved going down a very steep narrow hidden stairway, that must have been intended for servants originally, and led down into Elspeth’s rooms behind the scenes.
Initially we all contributed ideas for themes for meetings but gradually came to rely on Edey for this as she produced excellent ideas.
Peter Luck used to do the room booking and Brendan did the accounts. Ariadne was the main rent collector.
Ingrid put one photo from each contributor on the website with a meeting report various people wrote. I did it twice and discovered it was a task as some people would send me images the wrong size etc! Ingrid did it in a way that meant google logged it and I could just tell people to google my name for a large selection of my work!
We did not have an exhibition in the early days, that came later. I have never taken part having given up exhibiting after 2011.
I am very struck that the nature and structure of the group today is remarkably unchanged from the very beginning. We probably have a wider variety of nationalities now but that is a change in London itself.
One more recent development is the walks and trips Astrid, Eve and others now organise.
I hope these memories may be of some help Hugh. My very best wishes and a big thank you for starting us!
Sue
And that is how we did it! After the first few meetings, it took on a momentum and a life of its own, which I’m delighted continues fifteen years later.
Photos of the first exhibition in 2012 at Mile End Art Pavilion
Photos of early exhibitions in 2018/19
