If you know one name in the history of London night photography, it's probably Bill Brandt, whose A Night in London (1938) is a fixture on any decent photobook shelf.
What's had almost very little airtime in comparison is the man who beat him to it by 14 years: a jobbing postcard photographer from Hastings, East Sussex, called Fred Judge, who solved the era's toughest technical problem with a piece of DIY kit – and, it turns out, a well-placed lamp post.
In 1924, Judge self-published Camera Pictures of London at Night, one of the earliest sustained photographic studies of a city after dark, at a point when photography was still largely a daylight medium. It sold in small numbers, drifted out of print and vanished from the conversation.
Foxed Editions, a new imprint dedicated to overlooked photobooks, is reissuing it this month as a facsimile, with a new introduction by Isaac Blease, archivist at the Martin Parr Foundation.
Blease's foreword digs out exactly how Judge pulled this off, and it's the sort of detail that'll make any photographer wince and grin at the same time.
The camera he built himself
To his contemporaries, Judge wasn't an artist. He ran Judges Ltd, one of Britain's biggest postcard publishing firms; a business built on cheerful, reliable, entirely daylit views of seaside towns.
But he was also a fellow of the Royal Photographic Society, and in a 1929 lecture to its Pictorial Group, he traced his interest in night work back to Paul Martin's London by Gaslight, shown at the RPS in 1896.
Getting a usable exposure after dark in the 1920s meant fighting slow glass plates with whatever aperture you could find.
Judge's answer was to fashion a camera setup around a cinema lens capable of opening to f/1.9 – startlingly fast for the period – then shoot mostly without a tripod, bracing the rig against a lamp post or other fixed object for steadiness while exposing 60 x 45mm plates.
It's a proper bit of period lash-up ingenuity; closer to a street photographer's improvisation than a studio operator's careful set-up.
Judge himself wasn't precious about the results. He called the camera "a very feeble instrument" for capturing what he was after.
That undersells it, though: leaning on lamp posts and pushing a lens to its limit gave the pictures their soft bleed of gaslight and blurred, drifting figures. It's an aesthetic built from constraint rather than in spite of it.
Why it's still relevant
Every photographer who's ever pushed a sensor to a ridiculous ISO to grab a handheld shot after dark is, whether they know it or not, working in a tradition that Judge helped open up; just with a lamp post instead of in-body image stabilization.
There's a nice bookend to the story, too: in 2024, exactly a century after the book's release, Martin Parr bought a copy for his foundation's library, at the same time he was experimenting with what modern mirrorless cameras and camera phone sensors could do in low light.
A hundred years apart, two photographers were chasing the same problem with wildly different tools.
The facsimile keeps the scale and sequencing of the original photogravures rather than smoothing them into something more modern.
Given how rarely surviving copies turn up outside institutional collections, this is likely the most accessible route that most photographers will ever get to seeing how Judge actually made these pictures work.
Camera Pictures of London at Night by Fred Judge is published by Foxed Editions in July 2026, priced £24 (approximately $32 / AU$46) on pre-order with an RRP of £28 ($37 / AU$53).
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