Peter le Neve Foster

Peter le Neve Foster carried a glass plate camera everywhere, even to watch the giant needle from Egypt being raised on London’s embankment. He left behind dozens of glass negatives that capture, in blurry black and white, the cranes straining against the sky and the crowd craning their necks right back. Why he kept doing it is anyone’s guess—maybe the sheer spectacle, maybe the way light bounces off iron and stone. Find one of his prints in the “London 1878” folder and zoom in on the reflection in a puddle at the base of Cleopatra’s Needle.