The above photo was taken in Southport on 11th March 2020. I pointed my Alcatel Pixi 4 and pressed a button … then for artistic effect I pressed another button and made it black and white.
It was PLB, of course … thats Pre Lockdown Britain . If you are reading this after 2020 , look it up on hashtagsomethingorother for context.
The absence of people isn't unusual. Lots of my photos are of empty streets and rundown buildings.
Dystopia is sort of my thing. In my part of the world there are areas which appear to have been in lockdown since the last Tory landslide revised the North in the eighties .
No, none of this is remarkable so far , except for the ease of the operation. To understand this we need to go back . Back to when photography was a mysterious art. Back to a time when you had to know about light meters and exposure times.
In the late seventies , I was between lots of things. Education and Employment , adolescence and obsolescence , past and future. I had time on my hands and a capacity to learn. Night Classes were a great way to bridge knowledge gaps.
I had already tried my hand at Learn To Drive and Ballroom Dancing … and failed irrevocably at both.
Photography offered a new direction , particularly as I had , for no good reason , given twenty quid to a mate for a share of his dark room equipment.
I learnt a lot from my first lesson. The tutor was a full time teacher of something else during the day , and had ex pupils queueing up ( he told us ) to pose , tastefully , for class members. Mostly it would be composition work... bits of wood and flowers , and close ups of stamps and other things.
Most important of all , I learnt that you needed a camera. Not the cheap instamatic type of thing I was used to , but a proper , Single Lens Reflex camera.
The next thing I learned was that these weren't cheap. So after paying in advance for thirteen hours of teaching , I ended up paying something like a hundred pounds on an instalment plan for a Russian Zenith SLR camera , with integral light meter and leather case...Unfortunately , it was out of stock and I would have to wait a further two weeks before I could get hands on experience.
For the next couple of lessons,therefore, I wandered between groups of enthusiastic snappers , nodding thoughtfully and dropping encouraging comments on their twig arrangements. Both of these skills have served me well in other areas of my life ever since.
When I finally got my camera , I learnt another great life lesson. You have to be early to get the best shots particularly when there was a live model … especially as the prime position was already taken by the tutor ...
I only did one term . After that I felt able to let myself loose on the world with my black and white 35mm viewpoint.
Somewhere I have a photograph of rusting colliery railway lines converging eerily on an empty road to nowhere. It is a landmark , not only of social reportage , but because I developed the film and printed the photograph in my own (shared) darkroom.
The railway lines themselves are long gone.
