Chloe Dewe Mathews spent five years photographing up and down the River Thames, from its puddling source to its great estuarial mouth. Thames Log gathers the results of that long attention. The book’s concern is not the river as scenery but the river as an occasion: the ceremonies, trades, and pastimes that people arrange around fresh water and tidal reach. Ship-spotters log the continual stream of vessels that pass through Tilbury; mudlarks comb the city sludge for Roman and Saxon treasure. Above the tidal Thames, which transforms the landscape twice daily, the young river meanders gently through the verdant countryside. There, Dewe Mathews encounters neopagan rituals, eccentric coracle builders, and the custodians of royal swans. Boat burning in Oxford and evening prayer in Southend sit within the same sequence, as do mass baptisms and teenage rites of passage.
Away from the postcard view, the Thames here behaves less like a fixed landmark than like a protagonist in a series of ceremonies and practices that flow downstream. For some of those photographed, the water is a source from which to dream, or imagine other places, other rivers — the Volga, the Congo, the Ganges, Arcadia. For others it is a final point of departure, where ashes are scattered into its flow. Dewe Mathews works against documentary’s impulse to categorise and classify, pitting that tendency against the mystery and poetry of daily life.
What distinguishes the collection is how systematically it treats its own making. Each recorded event carries its exact GPS coordinates, date, tide, and weather, so that the photographs are anchored to precise conditions, and the act of gathering becomes visible alongside what is gathered. Arranged geographically along the river’s course, the sequence turns on French-folded pages in a softcover volume of 152 pages and 76 colour plates, 240 × 295 mm, with text by Marina Warner. Thames Log is Dewe Mathews’s fourth monograph, following Shot at Dawn, Caspian: the Elements and In Search of Frankenstein, and was co-published with the Martin Parr Foundation to accompany an exhibition there, 20 May to 29 August 2021.
For collectors, the case rests on the depth of the fieldwork and the book’s dual register: exact documentation on one side, open-ended ritual on the other. That combination, together with the measured design and the geographical sequence, makes it an unusually considered record of one river’s overlapping publics. It rewards sustained looking rather than a single pass.
