Reader Andrew has brought to my attention a series of remarkable photographs taken in the early 1930’s by John Morrison, Harold Burdekin of the city of London at night. These collaborators made two critical choices which, I think, define this magnificent work. First, they chose a London devoid of people. It is a London straight out of Sherlock Holmes, cold, draped in a fog of industrial polution, and dangerous. Indeed, you find yourself looking reflexively for the detective pair of Holmes and Watson in the shadows. Watson is armed with his service revolver – from his days in Afghanistan. Second, they chose the bluest of cold tones, projecting a true pictorialist inkiness. To my taste, I actually prefer the images as blacks and white, but I think it important to preserve the artists’ vision.

I believe that my favorite of these images is that of St Bartholomew’s Hospital, Smithfield – Gothic to the nth degree. And I will point out that “Barts” features heavily in the Sherlock Holmes stories. St. Bartholomew was the location of Watson’s medical training and the initial meeting between the two occurred in a chemical laboratory at St. Bartholomew in Arthur Conan Doyle‘s 1887 novel A Study in Scarlet.

Night is a time of uncertainty and just a touch of primordial fear. This is enhanced in night photography where artificial, or even, moonlight creates an ethereal other-worldliness. This is so brilliantly done in the St. Bartholomew’s image where the rays of blinding light that draw us into the foreground. And then our eyes are drawn out again through the second portal, through the archway and the gate. Unspeakable things are going on behind the windows, and there is a profound foreboding sense that it is a path of of no return.