In images, in picturesFor millennia, the Thames has carried its share of myths and mysteries. From the source to the estuary, photographer Chloe Dewe Mathews, who grew up on the outskirts, for five years captured the wealth of ties that unite Britons of all origins to the river.
From the hills of Gloucestershire, where it rises, to Canvey Island, at its estuary, the Thames meanders capriciously for nearly 350 km in the interior of England. Bucolic around Oxford, barely wider on the outskirts of Windsor, silty and already salty in London, the river has for centuries been a vital waterway: economic route, route of conquest also for invaders, Romans or Vikings.
Briton Chloe Dewe Mathews, 39, was raised on the banks of the Thames. Specialist in long-term photojournalism, she has done a magnificent job on the British, French and Belgian soldiers executed for refusing to go to the front during the First World War. (Shot at Dawn), another on the shores of the Caspian Sea (Caspian: The Elements).
A river more versatile than it seems
But a few years ago, she wanted to take an interest in the stream that saw her grow up. “When I was young, it represented something dangerous, I was told to be careful, that there were strong currents and that its waters were carrying lots of garbage – I walked by it every day when I went from home. me at school. But it also carried a mystery, it was a space of imagination ”, explains the young woman, installed in St Leonards-on-Sea, a coastal town in the English Channel, in the south of England, in Sussex.
For five years, she explored its surroundings, observed and questioned the people who strolled there, bathed there, practiced all kinds of rituals, personal, imported or even reinvented. The result is a very beautiful work, Thames Log, walking along a river much more versatile than it seems. “It started in a very natural way, she remembers. I thought to go from the source to the mouth of the river, because its course offers very different characters and I did not want to restrict myself to London. ”
She first spends long days walking along the banks, finding nothing, then gradually discovers an unexpected world. A jar of honey concealed in a stump at Kemble, near the source of the river, young women seeming to reproduce (or invent?) A pagan rite, dancing the round on its grassy banks near Oxford, the tapered hull of a finalist boat of the famous “boat race” between Cambridge and Oxford devoured by flames in the yard of a venerable middle School…
“It’s fascinating to see how people can recreate rituals by appropriating the river, by projecting religious meanings on it. »Chloe Dewe Mathews
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