It’s odd how sometimes a picture offers up something you lost first time round.
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| Hidden things, Lugano, 2018 |
We were on a day trip from Varese in Italy and had taken the train across the border into Switzerland, and while the family shopped till they dropped in swish departmental stores I wandered the streets snapping away.
And on Piazza Dante I came across the shop and attracted by the door way I took the picture, which then sat with a heap of others and was forgotten.
Yesterday I came across the collection and as you do looked again at the picture of the shop and discovered the rather odd looking head which my friend Lois described as “creepy”.
Now the discovery was no “Blow Up” moment, that film from 1966 by Michelangelo Antonioni when a fashion photographer thinks he has unwittingly captured a murder on film during a photo shoot.
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| "Creepy" things on the Piazza Dante, Lugano, 2018 |
He only makes the discovery in the darkroom while processing the film and in the processing enlarging the image, which of courses offers up the film’s title “Blow Up”.
Not that my creepy head is in anyway as dramatic, but it points to what we see and don’t see in pictures we take.
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| Enjoying the joke, 2018 |
And they became by far the most interesting subjects, leaving me to crop out the the tall entrance but leave a few of the passers by.
Nor is that all because going back and watching the film again over 50 years later I realized the park was Maryon Park in Chorlton close to where I grew up in Eltham.
Despite the close proximity it was a park I never visited which is a shame given that my Wikipedia tells me that the area was was a collection of sand pits known as “Hanging Wood, and were presented to the London County Council in 1891 by the Maryon-Wilson family, and one of the pits became Maryon Park.
Another pit became Charlton Athletic's football ground, The Valley.
The park was originally wooded and, together with what is now Maryon Wilson Park, was known as Hanging Woods. This was a wild wooded area and formed an ideal retreat for highwaymen who robbed travellers on Shooters Hill and Blackheath.
Though it is popularly supposed that the wood was used for hanging those who were caught, a more likely explanation for the name is the wood's location on steep slopes so that the trees appear to hang from the slope.
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| Maryon Park, Charlton, date unknown |
The park was opened in 1891, with JJ Sexby, then chief surveyor to LCC's parks department, designing serpentine paths around the slopes of the hill".
All of which was unknown to me and continuing the theme I could say its story had been hidden to me, but that would be a tortuous and perhaps contrived link from the original discovery from Lugano, so I won’t.
But l may have got confused with the street name which offers up more chances to play the hidden card.
Location; Lugano, and Charlton
Pictures; that shop in Lugano 2018 and Maryon Park, Charlton, date unknown from the collection of Kristina Bedford and reproduced in Woolwich Through Time, Kristina Bedford, 2014
*Maryon Park, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maryon_Park
Christine Drury. My father was a park keeper at Maryon Wilson Park when this was filmed. I was allowed to watch from a distance but not get near any of the actors.
ReplyDeleteGosh Christine what an experience!
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