Albert

It's Fathers' day here in the UK, so today's picture is in honour of my father. Taken over 90 years ago, the photograph shows a man who is both a stranger and also familiar - an older man I knew well, dressed in a younger man's clothes. I look at him and see some of my brother and bits of my son. I remember him, and I hope I see bits of myself

Bridge Art

 

There should be a special category of art for the work displayed on the metal panels that line endless railway bridges and other lumps of transport infrastructure in this country. Some of it is organised, some of it is feral, and much of it is boring and unimaginative - but some of it would earn a place in any posh gallery. My example comes from the railway bridge next to Brighouse Station and was produced, it seems, by students at Calderdale College. Well done, them.

Shibden Gate

There is always a temptation to submit images that don't pass the pinpoint definition test - or that fail short of the standard for clarity and contrast - to some AI controlled filter that promises "crystal clear pictures that look like they were taken yesterday!" I didn't take this photo of the Shibden valley near Halifax yesterday, and it's grainy uncertainty matches my memory just fine. AI, keep your hands off it.

 

Tired Pinks And Sooty Greens

 

The view looking back up the Calder Valley from the top of Long Wall, Elland provides all the sensuous curves demanded by even the most obsessive nineteenth century French Impressionist. And that palette of tired pinks and sooty greens perfectly suits this land we call home. The image is a result of my favourite occupation: just messing about.

78 RPM

 

I wake up today to discover that I have become 78. How nice that would be if it meant I could spin around faster than ever, or that the revolutionary fervour of my youth was stronger and more passionate than ever. Alas, it merely means that I've lost what clarity I ever had, I often repeat myself endlessly and have become increasingly out of date.

Stone Slates And Chimney Pots

 

This was the previous generation: the generation of stone slates and chimney pots, when harsh grey smoke drifted up to merge with a wet grey sky. It was bad for us - there can be no doubt about that. However, it will be a hard task to take a visually interesting photograph of some solar panels.

Looking Down

 

The photograph is one of dozens I've taken of Halifax from the top of Beacon Hill over the years. This particular one dates from the early 1970s. Sometimes, however, I'd been blessed with the ability to draw so I could have captured the view's magical detail. Fear not: artificial intelligence enables dreams to come true (and a fair number of nightmares as well, but that’s another story).

Rainy Days

 

You expect rain in Manchester. When I was there last week it rained from the moment I got off the train until the moment I stepped back on the train again, four hours later. The rain washed out the colours, but left the shapes. Who needs colours when you have shapes like these?

Liverpool!

 

This is a wonderful photograph - so much more eloquent than the usual smiling-face mugshot. That's my mother pointing, my brother Roger digging in the sand, and me looking attentively at what she's indicating. I suspect that could be Liverpool as the background suggest the photo was taken in New Brighton. Even the sloping horizon contributes to what is a fabulous composition.

Fishy Shapes

 

Like a cross between Halloween-costumed children and monsters auditioning for Doctor Who, these smokestacks dominated the skyline at Grimsby Fish Docks 40 or 50 years ago. I visited the docks whenever I could and took photographs of what was clearly a way of life living on borrowed time.

Never, Never, So

 

.. And speaking of fakes! No doubt people will recall the time Vincent van Gogh spent in Halifax in the early 1870s, and his fondness of the view from Greetland overlooking the Calder Valley towards Wainhouse Tower. This painting of his dates from that time. I know what you skeptics are going to say: "the tower wasn't completed until 1875". Van Gogh had such an imagination, however.

It Was Never So

This image comes from a 120 year old picture postcard of Halifax, and it is about as fake as any modern AI generated concoction. The colours have been painted in with all the skill of an arthritic canary, and the figures appear to have been randomly stuck on with haste as well as paste. Such images frame our view of the past as a time of clean streets, pretty colours, and blue skies. Beware - it was never so.

 

Skipping The Puddles

 

I've called this "Skipping the Puddles" because there are lots of skips and lots of puddles. It must be over forty years ago that I took the photograph, which means it was probably somewhere in South Yorkshire. I seem to have caught two people climbing over a factory wall, but it is perhaps a little late in the day to issue a Crimewatch appeal for their identification.

Of The Era

 

I may have used this image before on my daily calendar. After six years, I do occasionally repeat myself. I make no apologies; however, it has always been one of my favourite photographs of Halifax. I took it on Rhodes Street in the early 1970s, when large areas of that part of town were being cleared for demolition. For whatever reason, it speaks of the era.

Random Beach

Counting both the photographs I have taken myself over the last seventy or so years and the old photographs I have collected, I currently have some 114,000 stored on my hard disk. Sometimes I like to leave it to chance and use a random number generator to choose an image from this collection for my daily calendar. Today's is one such random choice. All I can tell you about it is that I took it back in May 2013 and I think it was somewhere in North Norfolk.

Down The Sepia Path

 

This is an old sepia photograph, taken from one of the many old album pages that litter my room. Many people believe that the sepia colour that characterises photographs from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is the result of fading over time. This isn’t actually the case; sepia toning was specifically introduced to combat the fading that was common in old photographs exposed to light. It later became a fashion statement in its own right, and most Victorian subjects - including this lady - would have preferred the sepia look to black and white.

Cleaning Up

In dating pictures of old Halifax, there are certain events that – rather like the destruction of the dinosaurs in geological times – mark the changeover between major epochs. One such event was the stone cleaning of Halifax Town Hall, bringing about its transition from soot-black to golden-stone, in 1972.

 

Concentrating The Mind's Eye

 

I took this photograph in Sheffield, forty-odd years ago. Could you take a similar photo now? The bin will certainly be gone, replaced by some overgrown plastic box. I'm not sure about the stairs and the railings. Today's photo would be digital, and, by default, in full colour - and that would somehow change the scene. Let's not pretend that black and white was more realistic; it wasn't. The lack of colour did, however, concentrate the eye and the mind.

Small And Wide In The Arctic

At first glance at this old family photograph, you might think something went wrong with the print's dimensions: everything appears far too wide for its own good. However, that was my grandmother, Harriet Ellen Burnett, and she really was very small and very wide. And that was the door of her house on Arctic Parade in Great Horton, Bradford and that was equally small and wide.

Ode To A Gable End

This is a proper gable end, not some half-hearted apology for a wall stuck onto the side of an over-delicate bungalow. It's seen life, this gable end: horses and carts, trams and trolleys, bikes and boats. Some might not see its beauty, but I did when I took this photo fifty-odd years ago - and I still see it today. This gable end was built to last.

Pretty Good

 

Let's start a new month with something pretty. This begins with a photograph I took a few years ago of a bit of land near Upper Edge, Elland, known locally as "The Wilderness". I fed that photograph into an AI machine and instructed it to come up with something interesting. This is the image that came out the other end - pretty good start to June, all told.