Then, she began to delve into other people’s stories,
spending months researching them to produce series like
In Service, which depicts the lives of early 20th-century
domestic servants in Britain, and Feral Children, which
conjures up scenes from the childhoods of real-life people
who grew up without human contact.
These days, Fullerton-Batten divides her time between
fine-art projects and commissioned work—and a little
mudlarking with her two young sons on the side. Mud-
larking is the practice of hunting through the mud on the
foreshore of the Thames at low tide for things the river
has left behind. Mudlarkers today search for trinkets and
archeological artifacts as a hobby, but mudlarking is an
old tradition whose fanciful-sounding name belies its
darker origins. In the 18th and 19th centuries, children
and elderly people living in poverty would search through
the mud for anything they could use or sell. It was her
modern-day mudlarking that led to Fullerton-Batten’s
Old Father Thames series.
Going mudlarking with her kids and a friend who’s a
serious mudlarker opened her eyes to the river’s history.
“There are hundreds, thousands, more likely millions
of possible stories based on history, traditions or customs
along the River Thames,” she says. “I suddenly realized
that I wanted to make my attraction to the river into aphotographic project.” She dug into historical accounts of
notable events and everyday life along the banks of the
Thames, then launched the project with a tribute to the
mudlarkers who first inspired her. Her “Mudlarkers”
image is set in the Victorian era, showing children carry-
ing buckets and searching the muddy foreshore.
Next came 20 more images, some dredging up stories
from the distant past, like the writer Mary Wollstone-
craft’s suicide attempt at Putney Bridge in 1795, others
portraying more recent events, like the completion of
Waterloo Bridge by a crew of female construction work-
ers during World War II and the surprising arrival of a
young bottlenose whale in central London in 2006. Still
others show ongoing traditions such as baptisms, the
Durga Puja Hindu religious ceremony and swan upping,
the annual wrangling of the royal swans that has taken
place since the Middle Ages.
Fullerton-Batten traveled in distance as well as time to
create her images. “I haven’t shot everything, for example,
in London,” she says. For an image depicting a baptism,
she found a spot where people used to be baptized in the
town of Cricklade, Wiltshire, near where the river begins.
“I try and shoot each scenario at the place where it all
really occurred,” she says. Sometimes that’s a tall order.
“There are very many rules and restrictions imposed byFlooding of Tate Britain, 201832 | Digital Photo Pro digitalphotopro.com