Why My Rivers Are All Female

Victorian photograph of the River Tame in Witton.

Over the last twelve years, I have been photographing the River Tame. My images follow the river, often into culverts, underpasses, low bridges, concrete viaducts, and shadowed channels, the places where it slips beneath the city and continues largely unseen.

The style of my photography has shifted over this time. Initially documentary, the images are now underexposed, emphasising the deep shade of these hidden spaces while leaving the water to hold a subtle luminance. In these dark corridors the river resonates with my own need for solitary moments: less managed, less visible, but utterly present.

Initially, I called these the Dark Waters, a reference to the river’s name, which is thought to derive from a Celtic root meaning “dark”. The Underneath sits more closely with my own presence there: I move quietly through hidden places, often alone, drawn to the river’s shadows and its resilience.

WHY MY RIVERS ARE ALL FEMALE

In 2013, I found the River Tame. I had been put forward for a project with the Environment Agency, and my task was to mediate the building of tall flood defences in Witton with the local community.

The river I met there flowed through a modern industrial estate, where it had been, quite literally, tamed. Its meanders were softened, its banks sanitised with mown grass - a river made into a landscape feature to eat your lunch beside. The grass was an unnerving green, and the water eerily quiet. Little remained of its wilder days, except the occasional rising up that sent water into businesses, shops, and nearby homes.

As part of the project, I walked stretches of the Tame with different people, thinking about how the new defences might sit without overwhelming the view of the river. Each walk drew me further upstream or downstream, until I found myself attempting to trace the whole line of the Tame through north Birmingham and the Black Country. Sometimes it was easy; mostly it was a puzzle. The river was fenced off, culverted, diverted, hidden behind infrastructure that had been given more importance than water. Again and again, I had to return to maps, trying to work out where it had been moved to, and what she had been asked to pass beneath.

And before I realised it, I was calling the river “she”, not “it”. She felt like a living being, one whose freedom of expression had been repeatedly curtailed. Her shape straightened, her meanders pinned, her babble muted, her light shaded under concrete. Yet through all of that she remained beautiful to me, perhaps more beautiful in her resilience, in her quiet refusal to disappear. I imagined her waiting: waiting to reclaim her own form.

It wasn’t necessarily that I saw anything inherently female in a river. It was that I sensed something of myself in the waters beneath the city.

I am currently in the process of being assessed for ADHD and autism, something that has recently become important to me. I have known that I have felt different from childhood, and I know that I shape myself to fit in, and I am easily shaped. A diagnosis matters now, in my mid/late forties, as I am beginning to push at the straighter culverts I often feel directed down, as much by myself as by anyone else.

At the end of the project, in 2015, I wrote this poem.

~ The Underneath ~