One of the tricks a great photographer can pull off is to make their job look easy. Taken between 2010 and 2012, Peter Marlow's large-format cathedral photographs fit firmly in that category. To the untrained eye, these hushed, glowing interiors, empty of people, might look like they were easy to set up and shoot. They were anything but.
An exhibition running at Southwark Cathedral titled The English Cathedral – drawn from Marlow's book of the same name, first published in 2012 – includes his planning notes alongside the finished prints, and they tell a very different story. One of admin, phone numbers scrawled in red biro, and vergers who needed persuading to switch off the lights.
