Feature Review: The Spirit of Hampstead Heath: colour photographs by Emilie Selbourne is at Burgh House and Hampstead Museum, New End Square, NW3 www.burghhouse.org.uk Open Wednesday to Friday and Sunday Noon to 5pm. Free.

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The Review - FEATURE
Published: 7 August 2008

Emilie Selbourne”s Reflections on Hampstead Heath

Framing the spirit of Hampstead Heath

TURNER and Constable committed the beauty of the Heath to canvas.
The rolling landscape has always brought artists to the area. Now a new exhibition by a Dartmouth Park-based photographer follows the route taken by the great landscape painters of the romantic period and updates the views from canvas on to photographic paper.
Emilie Selbourne trained as a photojournalist but rather than go into newspapers, it was the Heath that has provided her with a subject to study.
It started as college course, logging the people who use the Heath regularly, and developed from there.
She recalls being influenced by her father, the journalist David Selbourne. “As Communism was collapsing in eastern Europe, my father travelled extensively through the former Soviet countries. He met and interviewed dissidents, and then returned to discover they had become prominent political figures.”
He wrote articles for the Independent and was joined by two photographers, Mike Abrahams and Colin Jacobson. Their efforts eventually made it from newsprint into a book.
After being inspired by her father’s works, Emilie travelled to Sri Lanka and Bangladesh where she worked on a project teaching young people how to use cameras – and chronicle their lives.
She returned, completed an MA in photojournalism, and began to work on a photo project called The Commoners.
She studied Turner and his contemporaries – but she believes the real influence on her work is the hard to define sense she gets from her daily walks at dawn and dusk over the Heath.
“The exhibition picks up on people’s experience of the space,” she reveals. “The Heath means to me a place of serenity and healing, and a great wealth of history. People who have walked across it have left their spirit their.”
DAN CARRIER

• The Spirit of Hampstead Heath: colour photographs by Emilie Selbourne is at Burgh House and Hampstead Museum, New End Square, NW3
www.burghhouse.org.uk
Open Wednesday to Friday and Sunday Noon to 5pm. Free.

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