Photos at the Elbow Room in London

A very big thank you goes to Justin Carter of London for his interest in my photography. Carter is the brainchild of a highly successful group of establishments in England that combine elements of a bar, nightclub and pool hall. It's called The Elbow Room and there are five locations. Three are in London (Westbourne Grove, Islington and Shoreditch), one is in Bristol and another is up in Leeds. Carter contacted me last month after coming across my blog, complimenting my photography. We kept in contact and when I shared with him my idea of having a pool table delivered to a photo gallery showing my work, he offered the next best thing: to display some of my photos on the wall-mounted lightboxes at the Islington Elbow Room. So I emailed him the files, 12 of which he sent to a lab to have outputted onto translucent sheets. Because so much of the photos is nothing but black space, I decided to go for impact and crop them tight, into squares, to fill up all the space of the 435x435mm lightboxes.

One look at their website will give you an indication of how classy these places are (see below).The origin of the Elbow Room is rather funny. As the legend goes, Carter's idea came about when he was in Los Angeles in the 90s. Apparently he was at an upscale nightclub playing Kiefer Sutherland in 9-ball and "took him to the cleaners" ("a good potter but hopeless on the safety"). He came back with the idea and eventually the first location (Westbourne Grove) was opened in 1995. It went on to win Bar of the Year at the London Restaurant Awards the next year. "The idea was a simple one - to provide a stylish, yet relaxed place to play pool, creating an environment far different from the dingy back room of a pub, where your only opportunity for pool enjoyment was to try and beat the local 'meathead' in a winner-stays-on format." Sounds a lot like Sophie's. Speaking of, on a totally coincidental side note, Carter informed me that Elbow Room interior designer Paul Daly took one look at one of the photos and immediately recognized it as being from Sophie's, where he used to hang out when he lived in New York in the late 80s.