Winter Wonderland in Hyde Park. My first instinct on walking through the entrance was to turn and run, this whole thing is an assault on the eyes and ears; garish, ugly, noisy, tacky and cynical. But then I started taking photographs and I became kind of fascinated by the place. When I got home, I set about processing the pictures in a standard way, going for the loud colours and the bright lights. But there was something missing. These were just images of a fairground on a grey English day and they didn't say anything. It occurred to me to try out a process that would mimic the mass-produced Kodak consumer film from the 1970s, to replicate childhood memories of exactly these kind of places. But those tests just looked nostalgic and there still didn't seem to be any point to the images. I was about to walk away from the project when I started thinking about the history of these fairgrounds and whether anything except the technology had really changed about them. And that's when I started trying out some monochrome wet-plate process effects, mimicking the kind of photographs that were made at the end of the 19th century, and suddenly the origins of the thing seemed to jump to the foreground.
