London Fog: The Biography by Christine L. Corton

Author:Christine L. Corton [Corton, Christine L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, pdf
ISBN: 9780674088351
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 2015-11-02T07:00:00+00:00

Coburn’s pictures highlighted the mysteriousness and isolation produced by the fog. In his photograph Hyde Park Corner the lack of clutter, with the horse-drawn bus dimly visible in a solitary position between the trees, provides a sense of melancholy isolation. Everything behind the trees has lost its contour and shape.120 Another picture, Kensington Gardens, November, (Figure 5.13) produced in 1909, has a similar effect. Belloc’s text describes “the curious way in which London engulfs village after village, creeping round it as a flood of lava might creep round a temple or a walled enclosure,” creating an unspoken parallel to the way fog submerged the built environment.121 Whistler had complained some years before: “If the man who paints only the tree, or flower, or other surfaces he sees before him were an artist, the king of artists would be the photographer. It is for the artist to do something beyond this.”122 Coburn presented photography as art, using fog for aesthetic effect.

From finding fog oppressive, hellish, Stygian in its gloom, leading people to contemplate suicide or forcing them to leave for clearer skies elsewhere, foreigners who visited London had come to see in it an object of curiosity, even beauty. Nothing like it, as they frequently attested, could be found anywhere else in the world. Fog was London, and London was fog. As Monet painted, Coburn photographed, and Wilde and Symons wrote, fog seemed to have lost its earlier terrors. This was not merely a product of changing aesthetic fashion, though this of course had a lot to do with it. It also, as we shall now see, reflected changes in the nature of London fog itself.

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