Presentation by John Londei - Shutting up shop

On 1st March, John Londei was the guest at Guildford Photosoc, talking about his personal photography. John is a commercial photographer who lives in Guildford. Outside of his worktime, he has a fascination with taking large format photographs mainly of people. In the 70s and 80s, he took a series of photographs of small shops around the UK. These formed the subject of a book "Shutting up shop" which was published in the last few years and formed the basis of a private exhibition at National Portrait Gallery. Before publishing the book, John revisited the locations of the shops to see if he could still find the buildings, the proprietors or someone who remembered them.

The evening was interesting both from the standpoint of the shops and the stories of the people and from the standpoint of the photography. The pictures can be seen on his website www.johnlondei.co.uk.

He used the same wide angle lens for all the photographs. The images are in color, although the vignette of the lens and the appearance of the subjects give the images a strongly nostalgic feeling. Even though the subject matter of each photograph is similar, the shop and its staff, the variety of images is astounding. There are interiors taken at different viewpoints depending on the shape of the shop. There are exteriors, some taken square to the shop frontage tightly cropped. Others taken from further away so that the wide angle lens distorts the shape of the buildings.