Polly Braden Photography

A collaboration between Polly Braden & David CampanyThe River Lea runs from the Thames in east London up to Hertfordshire. Once a busy commercial waterway, it is now a nature reserve and leisure area. From the planned site for the 2012 Olympic Games it passes industrial estates, sports centres, new build homes and council estates.

Working together, Braden & Campany move between observational documentary and experimental stagings. There are poetic snapshots and theatrical incidents, naturalistic portraits and semi-fictional enactments. Responding to the strange beauty they find the photographs reflect the place but also reflect upon the processes and conventions of documentary at the same time.

Escape from the city; the reinvention of social spaces; the attraction of water; the meeting of different cultures; the persistence of nature. The project weaves together its motifs, building a complex description of the past, present and future of this half-forgotten thread of land.

Adventures in the Valley is an ongoing project. It was shown as a 150 image, 15 minute digital slideshow at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London as part of the programme London in Six Easy Steps, Summer 2005.

A beautiful photo essay, Adventures in the Valley filled one wall of the group show Real Estate; it was the most powerful piece in the show. Polly Braden and David Campany spent a year in the Lea Valley , part of which is to become the 2012 Olympic Village. Part nature reserve, part post-industrial concrete wilderness, the valley has had the good fortune to have been ignored by developers; its extraordinary vistas, with Canary Wharf looming over its shoulder, are captured in the 100 or so shots that slow-dissolve into one another. Between the pylons, gasworks, abandoned depots, defunct electricity-generating station and acres of meadowland, the inhabitants of the valley have forged their own little city of allotments, play areas and small businesses (300 of which will be given notice to quit).

Braden and Campany describe this landscape as one of “intimate chaos”. Someone has spray-painted “fuck Seb Coe” on a metal bridge across one of the Lea tributaries, where wildfowl are flourishing. The centre of what will be the Olympic Stadium is currently a beautiful tangle of wild flowers and weeds, seen here in weak winter sunlight. The Lea Valley has been a local place for local people, but there is no angry Little Englandism about the photos, nor any sentimentality – just a pervasive melancholy.

— Sarah Wise, The Guardian, September 1, 2005