TRIBUTE TO ‘PHOTO QUEEN’ OF BUSHY PARK
BY COLIN MUID, CHAIR OF FRIENDS OF BUSHY AND HOME PARKS
Sue Lindenberg is a Teddington-based wildlife and landscape photographer, best known for her extraordinary photographs of Bushy Park, Home Park, the Thames and the wildlife around this area of South West London.
Locally she has been described as ‘Bushy Park’s resident photographer,’ description that is actually quite apt. Her photographs have appeared repeatedly in local publications, Royal Parks material, calendars and community projects.
Sue gets up ridiculously early. She has regularly cycled into Bushy Park around 5am or even earlier, carrying a long camera lens, specifically to catch the period before and around sunrise when the park and its wildlife are at their most atmospheric.
That dedication explains why her photographs have a distinctive quality: mist, low sunlight, reflections, deer emerging from woodland, birds on the ponds and the park before it fills with people.
She photographs Bushy Park when almost nobody else is awake.
Her philosophy is unusually generous.
In an interview Sue gave during the Covid lockdown, she explained that she was posting her photographs on Twitter and local Facebook groups because so many people couldn’t get out into the parks.
Her words were essentially that she was trying to “bring the park to them.”
That tells you quite a lot about Sue.
She wasn’t primarily trying to build a commercial photography career or become famous. She saw the photographs as something she could give to her community.
During that period she described herself, rather self-deprecatingly, as an older person with a camera who loved photographing wildlife and landscapes around Teddington.
Her relationship with Bushy Park.
Sue’s work covers an astonishing range of Bushy Park wildlife. Among the subjects documented in her published work are:
Her work has also extended into Home Park and Richmond Park.
And she isn’t merely photographing the obvious spectacular subjects.
Some of her best-known local pictures are essentially tiny moments of animal behaviour — a mother bird with its young, a bird feeding a chick, a deer emerging through mist, or a swan crossing the water.
The Freddie the seal story
One of the most revealing episodes involving Sue came in February 2021.
A young seal, subsequently nicknamed Freddie Mercury, was spending time around Teddington Lock. Sue was photographing him when she noticed that a fishing hook was caught in his lip.
She and another bystander began contacting people to get help, including the lock keeper, and continued checking on the seal until the rescue was carried out by the British Divers Marine Life Rescue team.
She photographed Freddie catching fish despite the injury and later spoke about how relieved she was that the hook had been through his lip rather than his throat.
That episode demonstrates something important about Sue’s photography:
She is watching wildlife closely enough to notice when something is wrong. She’s not just pointing a camera at animals.
Sue has contributed photographs to TW Magazines, which have been distributed extensively around Teddington and the surrounding area.
She has had regular material under the heading “On the Wild Side”, and her photographs have appeared on magazine covers as well as inside the publications.
Her photographs have appeared in local calendars as well as frequently in the Friends of Bushy and Home Parks’ annual calendar.
The Royal Parks use her photographs to illustrate Bushy Park wildlife.
Most notably of all, perhaps, has been that a photograph taken by Sue has been chosen to feature in the BBC Countryfile calendar; not just in one year but twice in the past decade.
Her photographs were selected from thousands of entries in a national competition. A tremendous achievement for a local amateur photographer and a testament to her skill in recording Bushy Park’s wildlife.
Sue’s involvement with the local photography community continues.
Her photographs have been part of exhibitions at the Landmark Arts Centre in Teddington.
The Friends of Bushy and Home Parks have featured her work in our exhibitions and photographic projects, and she has contributed to talks and presentations about wildlife photography in Bushy and Home Parks.
She has created a substantial body of work.
In conclusion, Sue Lindenberg is a wonderful wildlife photographer. More than that, she has quietly documented our locality’s natural world for the people who live here.
Her devotion to Bushy Park is why I will describe her as Bushy Park’s “ambassador extraordinaire”.