Hackney Marshes - Before and After Dawn
/A photo essay by Adam Steiner:
All images: Adam Steiner
I got up early one morning, about 4.30am, it was summer and went out to try and capture the early dawn light that floods Hackney Marshes. One of the best things about the area is the contrast between urban/suburban and large park spaces; including the Lea valley nature reserve an bird sanctuary, housed in Victorian water filter beds.
The ground was covered in thick cotton fog that seemed to recede as you stepped into it. The light split through the trees and burning through the fog created a kind of spilt rainbow effect that was constantly changing like a turning kaleidoscope. The rusting, wide shoulders created a kind of bastard symmetry contrasted with the extreme brightness; a kind of grit and glamour effect.
Looking back across the field to the other side of the marshes, a couple of hours after the original shot, the blue sky had forced through the day, and once again this was intersected by the frames of the goalpost jutting against it; slicing the sky into crooked quadrants.
A few paces further back from the treeline when the fog had more or less dispersed.
This photo is not so special, but the full strength of the sun unhindered by the trees created this brilliant flare. Off to the far-right, in the distance, are Stratford and the Olympic Park. The skyline is mostly interrupted by the mass of lazy new developments happening in the area. A series of rabbit hutch apartments and faceless businesses – it’s great if this creates opportunities for people who live in the area, but it feels more like an opportunity to drive them out to a further zone of the city. You can also catch the ghost-legacy of the banal and moon-like atmosphere of the Olympic Park’s mid-masturbatory phallic Orbital spiral sculpture/slide thingy…
More displacement of perspective, a lineage of infinity boxes; one containing the other. I’ve recently been reading a lot of work by the late Mark Fisher (Ghosts of My Life) where talks at length about hauntology: the presence of non-events/thwarted possibilities - I can’t help but think of this idea looking through goalposts without people.
I was also amazed at the colours here; the marshes a bowl of moody blue gloom and the hulk of the council waste disposal centre a fierce peachy terracotta.
Again, similar colours but a different story. This salmon pink tower is one of the few high-rise buildings (with amazing uninterrupted views) in the area of Homerton on this side of the park. Rents in the area have steadily risen to become almost double, including in this building. Creating an exodus to nearby Walthamstow and beyond. The main shopping street a few streets beyond this building, Chatsworth Road, formerly known as Murder Mile, rises to a crest in the middle, from which you can peek over and see the jaded shine of the Canary Wharf tower – I always find this a grimly ironic vista for anyone who has grown-up in the area during the bad old days (of serial stabbings and shootings) which shows how close and yet how far wealth and power always seem to arise in London.
I liked this image for the mad pink of the sky and the goalposts of two pitches backing on to one another in opposition, the match is made small and intimate, but there’s no-one playing.
I thought this was quite a calming perspective, where the goals seem to shrink into one another in infinite regress, like a lens zooming in and out, losing focus over a span of time.
Adam Steiner's articles, poetry and fiction appear in Low Light Magazine, L’Ephemere Review, The Arsonist, Glove zine, Anti-Heroin Chic, The Bohemyth, I Am Not A Silent Poet, Rockland Lit, Proletarian Poetry, The Next Review, Fractured Nuance zine. Adam Produced the Disappear Here project: a series of 27 x poetry films about Coventry ring road. Adam on twitter.
