Monumental Sculpture

 

One should be able to nominate buildings as items of monumental sculpture, thus ensuring their preservation not for what they contain, but simply for the way they look, the shape they make, and the emotions they engender. I would like to nominate this group of buildings in Sowerby Bridge. Let's pickle them in aspic and sell little plastic models of them in souvenir shops throughout the land.

On The Slopes

Photography was made for groups. Get a group together - be it a group of friends, family, fellow workers, or ten-pin bowlers - and one of the first reactions is to get out a camera and record the moment for posterity. Group Photographs is one of the themes for this week's Sepia Saturday, and my contribution is this group of skiers in Switzerland in 1926. 

Picture History

My photo dates back to the 1960s and shows the junction of Cripplegate and Mulcture Hall Road in Halifax. There's a textbook-full of history in the buildings and a library's worth in the names of these two historic streets that run next to Halifax Minster. From healing wells to tolls for grinding corn, there's history in abundance here, but it's late and I'm tired so you will have to make do with just the picture.

Stoned

 

I took this photo a few years ago in Bradford, and what appealed to me was all the different types of stone on view in an anonymous back street. There's faced stone, rough stone, cobbled stone, and carved stone, and half a dozen other types you can spend a happy evening inventing names for. You can become almost intoxicated on stone - stoned on stone.

Windows 80

I call this photograph Windows 80, not as a tribute to some upcoming Microsoft operating system, but because it was taken in 1980 looking out of the window of my parents-in-law's house in Bedford Street, Elland. Images can truly transport us, and the sight of those curtains, the bowl of fruit, and those plastic flowers sends me cascading back through the decades with a potency no computer operating system can ever match.

The Sea, The Sea

My mother loved the sea. Go within salt-spray distance of the coast, and you would find her paddling along the shoreline, watching the waves come in. My brother sent me this photograph of her the other day from his island home, way across the ocean. It's been a good few years since I've seen him. Perhaps I should head for the coast, look out, and see if I can see him.

The Cauldron

 

On countless occasions in my youth, I would walk through Northowram village, along Howes Lane to the point where the earth ends and Shibden Valley begins. I would focus my camera on the lip of the cauldron that was Halifax, on the other side of the valley, and try to capture the smoke, soot and industry that was my home town. This photo, however, is only from a few years ago: the fields are green, the sky is blue and the cauldron is still.

Hebridean Dreaming

 

We were whisky distillery-hopping on Islay (can they be a finer way to spend time?) As someone once said (or sung), we stopped into a church, we passed along the way. I took this photograph, and then we moved on. Hebridean dreaming, on such a winter's day.

... And They Sailed Away

 

My trawl through my collection of old photographs to find a suitable illustration for St. Valentine's Day came up with this one. As so often is the case, I have no idea who these two are or where and when the photo was taken. That doesn't matter: it perfectly illustrates what Valentine's Day is all about. Whoever they were, I hope they sailed away to a long and happy life together.

Beacon Hill Timeline

 

I sometimes think that one of my most useful contributions to history would be to produce a Beacon Hill timeline. So many old photographs of Halifax feature Beacon Hill as an ever-present dramatic backdrop, and the changing degree of vegetation on the hill could provide a useful timestamp in dating such photos. After consulting the beta version of my timeline, I suspect I must have taken this photograph in the late 1980s.

Photographic History At Its Best

 

This photograph came to me from my Great Uncle, Fowler Beanland, who, during the First World War, was a foreman at a munitions factory in Keighley. The photo shows fifteen female munitions workers - just a small proportion of the many hundreds who worked for Longbottom and Farrar's, which was, at the time, part of the British Shell Factory. Photographic history at its best.