Here is the third group of five photographs which are on the shortlist for making into small prints for sale at the Arts and Crafts Fair. Again they represent the kind of familiar subjects I have returned to again and again over sixty years of taking photographs. This selection includes two of my favourite Halifax photographs, and another two from that enigma of the East Coast - Skegness.
My photographs are filed by the date they were taken, and therefore it is relatively easy to go back in time to discover what I was doing on this day, five, ten or twenty years ago. In this case it was ten years ago, and on the 26th April 2012 I was obviously visiting Scarborough. Today’s image is based on one of the photographs I took that day, and shows the Spa complex and the Grand Hotel.
My grandparents, Catherine and Albert Beanland, in a photograph taken a few years before my birth. According to the 1939 Register, they were living at 12, Lawrence Street, in the Princeville district of Bradford. Albert, 64 years old in 1939, was employed as a textile mechanic, whereas Catherine, 62, was registered as undertaking "unpaid domestic duties". Albert was to live another nine years, but died a few months after my birth, in September 1948. Catherine died in April 1960, aged 83.
As provided for in the Treaty Of Stainland, my wife and I take the dog for a walk up Greetland at least once a month. Yesterday was the April walk, and the sun and blue skies made it a delightful experience. I took this photograph of a footpath that heads towards the Calder Valley, and the addition of a filter or two accentuates the Yorkshire stone and the rain-fed grass. And yes, that is Wainhouse Tower on the skyline.
This is based on an old, found photograph of an unknown seaside location. I am not sure where it is, but an area has been fenced off to protect the bathers from boats, or sharks, or some such. The date is probably the 1920s. The filters I have used in this interpretation of the print, somehow seem to make the scene more crowded, which is what you want on a summer day by the sea.
A detail taken from a found print of a group of unknown women - possibly fellow workers, possibly from the 1920s or 30s. In the main photo they seem to be gathered around a woman holding a banjo wrapped in brown paper. I have chosen to concentrate on a small section of the group, which provides a most pleasing arrangement of hands and faces.
The next five from my shortlist of twenty-five prints, from which I must choose five for a Church Arts and Crafts Fair. In each case, the mix is made up from old and new, near and far.
The front of this vintage postcard illustrates The Cross in Elland, that part of the town where roads from here, there and everywhere came together. The few words on the reverse of the card provide clues to the movement of ordinary folk - to here, there, and everywhere - that was a common feature in peoples' lives even 120 years ago. The card was sent by Elizabeth Chamberlain, who, in September 1905, was living with her uncle and aunt, Robert and Emma Newton, in Exley Lane, Elland. Robert worked at Elland gas works and had been born in London. His wife, Emma had been born in Spalding in Lincolnshire, and their niece, Elizabeth, had been born in Boston. She was writing to her friend (or, possibly, sister) Annie Holbard, who was then living with her husband, a fish curer, in Cleethorpes. Within a couple of years they would move to With-on-Dearne in South Yorkshire where he would become a coal miner. So often, we think of these olden times as being times when families were settled in one place, entire generations living within a few streets of one another. By the second half of the nineteenth century, however, times were changing, and new industries and improved transport meant that people moved from one part of the country to another much more frequently.
The short message on the reverse of the card illustrates this ease of movement, because Elizabeth was going to visit Annie Halbard and was due to leave Elland at 8.00am and arrive in Cleethorpes before noon.
18, Exley Lane, Elland : Dear Annie I was please to have a card from you to say that I could come. Well I shall leave Elland at 8 o clock and should arrive at Cleethorpe 5 minutes to 12 o clock if all is well. With love to all, hope to see you on Saturday, from your E A Chamberlain.
Such a journey would only be possible today if you first of all took a bus, as Elland railway station is long gone. Rather than heading for Cleethorpes, Elizabeth could always walk up to Elland; but even then she would now find many of the shops closed, and the Cross looking like a shadow of its former self.
I've always found that the march of technological innovation has been faster than anything I could reasonably predict. I remember in the very early days of computers, speculating that one day - in the distant future - it would be possible to have all the knowledge stored in the full Encyclopaedia Brittanica, available on a machine on my desktop. Before the ink was dry on my prediction - these were the days on pen and ink - there was Encarta, the first digital encyclopaedia. In the 1980s, as I was gradually losing all my hearing, I remember saying to people that it could be worse, because within twenty years I would be able to carry a mobile computer that would translate speech into text for me. Within 10 years that prediction had been blasted out of the water, and I had a computer processor attached to my head that translated audio inputs into electronic stimulation of my audial nerve. Mindboggling - in every sense of the word!
When AI programmes started being able to manipulate images a couple of years ago, I equally remember saying to my wife, that before too long I would be able to sit down and have a conversation with my grandfather, who died a few months before I was born in 1948. This morning I did!
These days, this photograph would come under the heading of "Street Photography". When I took it over half a century ago, it cam...
