After many years as a successful photographer using modern digital equipment, in 2006 Dave Hacker picked up an old film camera and began taking shots of familiar London landmarks - Tower Bridge, Trafalgar Square, the Houses of Parliament, the Millennium Bridge.

The resulting series - which Hacker calls Metropolis Reverse - have the grainy romance of nineteenth century daguerreotypes. Through Hacker’s lens even the most contemporary architecture takes on a magical, historicised patina. The view of London’s City Hall might almost have been snapped by the ghost of Henry Fox Talbot, while a seemingly antique portrait of the Palace of Westminster…

After many years as a successful photographer using modern digital equipment, in 2006 Dave Hacker picked up an old film camera and began taking shots of familiar London landmarks - Tower Bridge, Trafalgar Square, the Houses of Parliament, the Millennium Bridge.

The resulting series - which Hacker calls Metropolis Reverse - have the grainy romance of nineteenth century daguerreotypes. Through Hacker’s lens even the most contemporary architecture takes on a magical, historicised patina. The view of London’s City Hall might almost have been snapped by the ghost of Henry Fox Talbot, while a seemingly antique portrait of the Palace of Westminster is confirmed as a modern image only by the struts and spars of the London Eye ferris wheel encroaching in the foreground.

Hacker has said of this series, ‘My Through the Viewfinder photography has evolved through boredom of the modern digital camera viewfinder. I can find them uninspiring, while the old film cameras have some magic when you look through them that the modern have lost. Here, where I combine digital and film cameras, I try to put back in what I feel has been lost, which I started to experiment with at the beginning of 2006.’

If there is any nostalgia at work here it is not merely for an idealised architectural past, but also for the adventurous early years of photography. Nor is the Bournemouth-based artist solely focused on the city. Hacker has also shot a series of Dorset coastal scenes using the same technique. Here again, the images self-consciously reference the past, some being startlingly reminiscent of the work of pioneering French photographer Gustave Le Gray (1820-1882), whose lustrous seascapes are now highly prized by collectors. Unscathed by human intervention, the natural world retains its timeless essence and proves an ideal subject for Hacker’s innovative project.

‘I have kept to photographing the popular places,’ says Hacker, ‘to try and rediscover their magic again as if it’s the first time you have seen them. You are also seeing them in the photographer’s view of them, for they are in reverse, as when you look down through the view finder. They also have my unique fingerprint stamp on them - of the dust and marks that have formed on the ground glass.’

Dave Hacker is widely travelled. His camera has taken him to China, Thailand, Japan and the United States. He is as likely to be found in the cockpit of an aircraft, shooting Dorset from the air, as in a forest at dawn awaiting first light. Metropolis Reverse is the first series he has shown with Eyestorm.

The black and white works shown here are also available in the larger size of 80cm x 80cm in editions of 7 for £850 +VAT. Please contact us if you are interested.