Viva Brighton Issue #56 October 2017
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PHOTOGRAPHY<br />
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Tony Tree<br />
A tale of two houses<br />
“There is something very special about going<br />
into any of those rooms,” says Tony Tree of the<br />
celebrated artists homes at Farleys House and at<br />
Charleston, once gathering places of the Modernists<br />
and Surrealists, and of the Bloomsbury Set,<br />
respectively. “You get the spirit of them, and a<br />
sense of place and of person.”<br />
Tony began documenting the houses in 1975,<br />
when as a freelancer looking to specialise in “potters,<br />
painters and poets”, he went to photograph<br />
the painter Duncan Grant at his Charleston Farmhouse<br />
home on the occasion of his 90th birthday.<br />
“I went in there and it was extraordinary. He<br />
wasn’t in good health and the place was grim but I<br />
spent a long time with him. He offered me coffee,<br />
drinks and strong cigarettes and I got some lovely<br />
photographs. I looked around the house and I<br />
thought, ‘I’d love to get back in here sometime’.<br />
Grant died in 1978 and Tony returned occasionally<br />
over the years to photograph conservation<br />
work and then to document the literary festival<br />
and the ‘Charleston Regained’ restoration project.<br />
“They took the house to bits and then put it back<br />
together. I was there every day, over a long period<br />
of time, seeing the house down to its bones.<br />
“I grew to feel a real affection for the place. And<br />
for the people who worked there. It was a really<br />
close-knit group and it was a wonderful time.<br />
Making friends with the guests, photographing the<br />
festivals; I got to have one-to-ones with Harold<br />
Pinter, Susan Sontag and John Mortimer. The<br />
green room was the kitchen. It was so extraordinary,<br />
the number of people who went through that<br />
kitchen. There was wonderful food, a warm Aga,<br />
bon ami and amazing chat.”<br />
Then came a call from Antony Penrose. An<br />
established filmmaker himself, he was giving talks<br />
about his late mother, the famous war photogra-<br />
Duncan Grant, photographed on his 90th birthday in January 1975<br />
The garden room at Charleston Farm House, with a portrait of Virginia Woolf by Vanessa Bell<br />
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