My friend, Jim Grover, has organised a remarkable exhibition in a 1950s church, St. James, Park Hill, in Clapham.  It pairs nineteenth-century steel engravings with his own photographs of related subjects, which makes one look at both his photographs and the steel engravings with a different order of interest.

The engravings are selected from the Imperial Family Bible, published in 1844.  They are then blown up, so that one can appreciate the amazing precision in all the detail.  They are then paired with his own admirable – and equally technically accomplished – photographs of religious scenes, many from the church where the exhibition is on from Wednesday to October 18th.

To show this in practice, here is Daniele de Volterra’s Descent from the Cross:-

Here is the steel engravings by William Holl:-

And here is the photographic emlargement:-

What the photographic enlargement demonstrate with great clarity is the compositional character of the original.

For more on this topic, see ‘Mastering the Copy’, exhibition catalogue, National Museum, Oslo, 2026.  Meanwhile, it’s easier to get to Clapham.