30 15 June 2019 I http://www.amateurphotographer.co.uk I subscribe 0330 333 1113
Photo Stories
ALL IMAGES © SUE BARR
S
ome 350 years ago, the fi rst young
men of the British upper classes –
accompanied by chaperones – made
their way across their home continent
on a trip that was designed to improve and
educate them, particularly in their appreciation
of the arts. Typically, the route would take these
tourists through France and into Switzerland
and Italy, crossing the Alps before heading
south, usually towards Naples.
More recently – in 2005, in fact –
architectural photographer Sue Barr was
working on a book on European houses from
the 1970s with historian David Heathcote. It
was a project that took them across France,
Switzerland and Italy, and a great deal of
their time was spent driving. As they were
heading back to the UK from Genoa, for the
fi rst time Sue really took in the astonishing
scale of northern Italy’s Autostrade. ‘They
looked amazing,’ she recalls. ‘Like animals
walking across the landscape. I started to
research these megastructures as I’d been
looking for a new project. And, because I teach
at the Architectural Association and come
from an architectural background, it became
an investigation of engineering and landscape.’
Needless to say, Sue had to narrow down
the scope somewhat. In the course of her
early research, she learned that motorways
were not invented in Germany, as so many of
us still believe, but in Italy. Not only that, they
often follow the route of the Grand Tour. ‘They
started being built around the 1920s,’ she
explains. ‘The fi rst came out of Genoa, and
they expanded to take the rich Milanese to
their holiday homes on the lakes.’
Where things became particularly interesting
was the point at which tourists made their way
through Europe via the Alps. In the early days
of the Grand Tour, they would catch a boat
from the south of France to Genoa, but at
some point it was decided that the mountains
were worth seeing. Mountains that, until the
early 19th century, were extremely diffi cult
to cross. But cross them they did, because by
that point it was fashionable to search for the
‘sublime’ experience portrayed in paintings
by JMW Turner and refl ected in the writings
of Edmund Burke.
‘The routes of the Grand Tour suggested a
fi eld of study for the project,’ Sue says, ‘with
the Alps being a good place to start. TheTake the high road
The motorways of Europe might not sound like the
most obvious subject for a project, but they ended
up taking Sue Barr on a modern-day Grand Tour
project ended in Naples because generally
speaking that was the end point of the Grand
Tour. Some, but not many, went on to Sicily and
Greece, so there was an idea that Naples was
almost the end of civilisation.’Size and scale
Once she had decided what she was going to
photograph, the question then arose of how to
photograph it. Sue wanted to portray the sheer
scale and enormity of the structures, but the
limitations of the photographic frame meant
she would only ever be able to present a small
section of them. As such, she spent a lot of
time researching maps and their topography,
paying particular attention to how the city,
landscape and motorway intersected. Google
Earth and Google Street View were her
saviours. And because she only had the
summer holidays to work on the project, she
had to use her time carefully, shooting Udine
one year, Genoa another, and Naples another.
‘I spent a lot of time driving,’ she says. ‘Often,
Google would suggest a fantastic junction or
intersection; I’d be on the motorway and I’d
fi nd myself zooming past it – with the next
junction being 10 miles down the road.’
Initially, Sue had hoped to shoot the project
on 5x4in, but it would have proved prohibitively
expensive, so before she shot the fi rst frame
she transitioned from analogue to digital. ‘It
was a profound shift,’ she recalls, ‘because
light works so differently, and sensors behave
differently from fi lm.’
The project was shot on a Silvestri Bicam II
with a second-hand Phase One P65+ back
and just one lens: a Rodenstock 70mm
f/5.6 HR Digaron-W, also second-hand. ‘The
Silvestri is brilliant for travelling,’ Sue says, ‘as
it fi ts in a backpack and is compact because it
has only rise – no tilt.’
As a woman traveller, did she fi nd working
alone, for weeks at a time, at all intimidating?
‘You do get a lot of hassle in Italy, especially in
the cities,’ she recalls. ‘I would just be as polite
as possible whenever I was approached.’
And what about access? ‘I went down minor
B and C roads a lot, trying to fi nd the right
angles – and sometimes climbing over fences
to get there. I didn’t break any rules, but I may
have pushed the boundaries a bit,’ she says,
smiling. ‘And I used to say I was a student,
as you can get away with anything then!’