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Let There Be Light by David Dunsford
Let There Be Light by David Dunsford
David Dunsford was already an accomplished scrap-metal merchant and secondhand car dealer when the underwater world of his local canal completed a sort of personal trinity.
His book Let There Be Light is a collection of images gathered during years of scouring the dark waters, a search that began with an unmarked weapon disposed of in error from a nearby bridge.
Dunsford's epiphany came one night when he stumbled upon what he now playfully describes as the 'great white shopping trolley'.
He had thought for a moment that he was literally under attack, but in the reduced visibility a castor wheel had simply caught him on the ear.
As he recovered from the shock, he was struck again - this time by the seductive charm of the abandoned cart as his torchbeam played upon its cheap chroming. 'I was forced to reconsider my very existence up to that moment,' Dunsford was to say later.
It was indeed the start of a new career for this dedicated diver, as he set out to capture such quintessential moments on film, concentrating on the underwater experiences offered by the Grand Union Canal that passed his yard.
At a time of pollution, vandalism and sledgehammer coarse-fishing practices, the world of the inland waterway needs all the champions it can get. Like war photographers, those with canal knowledge bring back images that allow a peculiar insight into an otherwise closed, secret world. Nor has Dunsford been content to rest on his laurels with his marvellous, and by now trademark, underwater shopping-trolley images.
This handsomely produced book is packed with a wide range of haunting images, revealing that this sympathetic lens-meister is as comfortable shooting a perambulator or a milk crate as he is a buggy or a bicycle wheel.
And the results are genuinely moving. As Dunsford's friend and yard manager Roger Simonson says in his preface: 'If the chord structure of a Beethoven sonata can paint a picture, and the total shading of a picture can sing a song, this book is full of pictures that, by comparison, make the noises from an hydraulic crusher lyrical.'
Sam Agen
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Let There Be Light by David Dunsford (Oceans Frustrated). Hardback, 64pp, £39.99
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