Kingdoms may come, kingdoms may go
Whatever the end may be
Old Father Thames keeps rolling along
Down to the mighty seaS
o go the lyrics of the 1933 ballad “Old Father
Thames.” The song is an exhortation to Britons
weathering the precarious period between two
devastating wars to keep their chins up and their char-
acter steady, like the river that flows through their capital
city. Along the banks of that tidal river, the stories of their
everyday lives unfolded, and extraordinary events took
place. For millennia, the Thames has been a nexus for all
manner of human activity, from commerce and labor to
religion and leisure to struggles with nature and personal
triumphs and tragedies. It’s no surprise, then, that an artist
like Julia Fullerton-Batten would find inspiration there.
The London-based fine-art photographer has a zeal for
uncovering fascinating stories and using rich colors, cin-
ematic lighting and a healthy dose of imagination to bring
them to life. She has brought this narrative style to her lat-
est series of images, also called Old Father Thames.“I started Old Father Thames because I live near the
river, and I used to live in Oxford, which also has the river
flowing through it,” says Fullerton-Batten.
She spent her childhood in the United States and Ger-
many before moving to Oxford as a teenager. Her stud-
ies took her to art school, where she started shooting with
large-format cameras and the kind of deliberate atten-
tion to capturing each frame that she has favored ever
since. After spending five years assisting on advertising
shoots and picking up the lighting and production chops
that are essential to her assiduously produced large-scale
images today, she began shooting for commercial clients
of her own.
Then, in 2005, she broke into the fine-art world with
her fantastical series Teenage Stories. Using street-cast
models and drawing on stories from Fullerton-Batten’s
own life, the series explored the anxieties and imaginative
lives of teenage girls.
She followed Teenage Stories with a steady flow of
inventive fine-art series that have a strong narrative focus.
In earlier series, like Awkward, In Between and Mothers
and Daughters, she continued to mine her own biography.Mudlarkers, 201830 | Digital Photo Pro digitalphotopro.com