Cause And Effect

I am not quite sure where this was taken from, but it could well have been in the King Cross area of Halifax. Whilst the dirt was being blasted off the public buildings of the town in the early 1970s, many terraces still bore witness to their sooty past. This multitude of chimneys, bitumen-black, gave evidence to both cause and effect.

When Not Why

There are two possible questions to go with this particular scan from my collection of old negatives. The first is, should old buildings be cleaned? There is an argument which says that power-washing the dirt, soot and grime off these fine old Victorian stone buildings is the architectural equivalent of a face-lift: momentarily interesting but, in the long term, depressingly invasive. However, I am putting off such a debate for a sunnier day in order to concentrate on the second, slightly more prosaic, question: when was Halifax Town Hall stone cleaned? I have combed through the copious wisdom of Uncle Google without pinning an exact date down. The date may remain a mystery, but I am pretty certain of the time: five to eight in the morning (or, just possibly, in the evening!)

Subtracting Detail

The grain of photographic film emulsions is a magical thing, it can take a pedestrian scene and transform it to a moody masterpiece. It doesn't achieve such a transformation by adding anything, but by subtracting. Subtracting detail, highlights, contrast; leaving just emotion.

Man In A Flat Cap

A man in a flat cap, rushing passed the railings, trying to avoid the coming rain. Sheffield in the early 1980s. It was still a black and white world back then, but change was coming, and the man in the flat cap had about as much chance of avoiding it as he did avoiding the rain.

Faded Pleasure

By the 1960s, all that was left of the once magnificent Sunny Vale Pleasure Gardens was a Go-Kart track, a rubbish-filled lake and a host of memories. There were two lakes - Victoria and Alexandra - and I am not sure which this one - I captured in this photo from the late 1960s - was.  I can just about remember going to the gardens in the late 1950s, and by then their glory was very much faded. It is hard to imagine that this forgotten little valley, hidden away behind Hipperholme Cross Roads, was once one of the premier northern leisure resorts of Edwardian England.

Fire In Halifax #2

Fifty years ago I took a series of photographs of a fire in Halifax. It was just a relatively small fire in one of the mills; none of the photographs actually show the fire itself. It was the fire engines, the hose pipes and, in particular, the watching crowds that fascinated me then, and still do: fifty years down the line. The bee-hive hair styles, the bow-legged man, the housewives with babies and children who go out to watch the goings-on: Halifax folk in a world gone by.

Overlooking Halifax

This is a new scan of a negative I must have taken fifty or more years ago. It was taken from the churchyard of St Thomas' Church, Claremount, and shows the bottom part of Halifax back in the days when the buildings were still soot-black and the chimneys that made them so were still smoking.  Halifax Minster is half hidden by a gravestone, but Square Church can be seen on the right of the picture and this helps to date the photograph as the main body of the church was destroyed by fire in 1971.

Killing Three Birds With A Sea Urchin

My brother Roger sent me an email earlier today complementing me on the new Blog lay-out, and asking me to try and feature more of my old negatives and more old family photographs. I am able to kill two birds with one stone because, by chance, the next strip of negatives awaiting scanning features family members - indeed, none other than my brother himself. The six photographs on the negative strip are featured in the composite image below, and they were all taken during a family holiday to Scotland in the 1960s. 

The featured photograph at the top of this post shows Roger in a rowing boat, on - I think - Loch Levan, and holding a sea urchin shell which he had just pulled from the Loch. I am not entirely sure of the year - my best guess was 1963 - but by featuring the photograph here, there is a good chance that a comment will appear from my brother on the other side of the world, identifying the time precisely. Thus I will be able to date the negatives and kill three birds with one simple negative stone.

Photography Is A Greedy Medium

It is clearly no coincidence that impressionism in art coincided with the development of photography. Once you could capture a true image of a scene or a person on paper or film, the school of art that strived to ape nature became redundant in the click of a shutter. Once you could get a daguerreotype of Auntie Winnie - warts and all - the last thing you needed to do was to employ some itinerant artist to do a similar job. If you did employ an artist, far better that he, or she, produce an impression of the fragrant Winnie as she wafted her way through life many decades ago.

But photography is a greedy medium: no sooner had it captured the representational market, it made a play for the impressionist work. You could even pretend that you had accidentally got the photo of Ethel and Joan and their boys out of focus and still come up with an impressionist masterpiece. 

Sheffield in winter becomes a steel symphony of light and shade.

The leaden skies seem to evaporate from the Lakeland hills.

The Satisfaction Of The Dark

Around about the same time that I was bouncing political peas off the poor population of Halifax, I was also taking their photographs. This is a sequence of photographs I took at Halifax Gala in the mid 1960s. I don't know why it should be so, but old photographs mature with age, like a half-decent wine. There is something rather satisfying about these dark monochrome shots, something that cannot be reproduced by the pin-sharp, perfectly exposed, multi-pixel pictures of today.

Gladys In Blackpool : A Birthday Celebration

July 27th was my mother's birthday and she would have been 105 years old today. To mark the day I have dug deep into the box containing old photographic odds and ends and discovered an unframed 35mm colour slide dating back to the 1960s. When scanned and cleaned-up it shows my mother, Gladys, stood on the sands at Blackpool - at that point where the land and the water meet, a point that was always her favourite location. The fact that it was Blackpool didn't really matter, she would have been just as happy in Scarborough, or Bournemouth or, I suspect, Tristan da Cunha: as long as she was at the point where sand and sea met and she could gaze out towards the distant horizon looking for - who knows what?

I don't know what because, I regret to say, I never asked her. I doubt that it was the sea that was the draw: she didn't particularly enjoy being on the sea as such. And it wasn't the established seaside paraphernalia that attracted her: she wasn't one for deck chairs and pony rides, hot dogs and cold bathing. I like to think that it was the merging and the margin that appealed to her - the point and which land became sea; the point at which one state became another.

I enjoy the seaside as well as the next man, but it doesn't draw me like it drew my mother. However I am fond of the merging at the margins, the transformation of one thing into something else. I am drawn to that place where an image is transformed from being a factual record into something else. I am not quite sure what that something else is, but the very same photograph of my mother in Blackpool provides a good example. The left of the photograph shows a perfect representation of my mother: wrapped up against the wind blowing off the Irish Sea, anchored to the wet sands in her fur boots. By the time your eye has reached the right of the photograph, something else is taking place - something to do with impressions and shapes and colours and memory.

So this birthday celebration allows both my mother and I to wander the place we love the best, observing the coming together of sea and land, reality and memory. Happy birthday Mam.

Time Travel Around Halifax

Because of the construction work, it is possible to date this photograph reasonably precisely. I must have taken it sometime in 1970 although it has lain dormant in my negative files until I scanned it yesterday. If you know Halifax, you can click on the image to enlarge it and then take a tour around the town of forty years ago. If you don't know Halifax, you can find an account of the construction of the road - known as Burdock Way - on the splendidly nerdish CBRD Website.