A Leica Q2 enters my life

Last year I managed to purchase a Leica Q2 and have been using it in place of my Panasonic largely because of the sharpness it brings to the image. Although I began initially using the camera for photographs of anything that stopped me I soon began to take photographs of the South Pennines.

I was thinking about the Boxing Day floods and I worked out a method that spoke about the rivers and catchment areas through superimposition. I exhibited the photographs at A Space for Photography, Arles, with six other photographers who had trained at the University of Ulster and locally at a Nanholme Open Weekend. This is what I wrote for the Arles publicity:

Upper Calder Catchment Area No 1. Golden Water from Source to River Calder water bodies

This work is part of a series taken in the South Pennines in Yorkshire, where I live, begun before the pandemic. I have used a vintage 1930s Plaubel, a pinhole, and here, a Leica Q2 to describe the immediate environment and my emotional response to it. Now, the photographs hark back to the famous Boxing Day floods that affected the north of England in 2021 and although the environment no longer shows damage, memories continue to impact on minds and behaviours. The volume of water that surged down the valleys was unimaginable. We all believe in climate change now.

Upper Calder Catchment Area No 15. Hebden Water from Widdop Beck to River Calder water bodies

How to describe a process that has taken an era; that becomes invisible through the length of time it has taken? Problems with the climate have only become recognisable in the last few decades but atmospheric change linked to global warming has been known of since the Industrial Revolution. The work buys in to the pictorialism of the early pioneer photographers from that time but it is disrupted alluding to the changes that we can see happening in the environment now.

Upper Calder Catchment Area No 20. River Calder from Walsden Water to Colden Water water bodies

The titles reference catchment data by area although it falls in the Upper Calder region. The landscapes that I make are specific to the area including many of the characteristic features. With superimposition I have chosen to indicate that water flows through all things, even inanimate objects, understandable to those who dwell in a wet climate. There is refraction by photography itself and furthermore by the occluding of lines leading into the depths of the landscape.

The threat of flooding is becoming more frequent.

Upper Calder Catchment Area No 31. River Calder from Walsden Water to Colden Water water bodies

New Lerouge pinhole camera

For Christmas I was given a new ready-made pinhole camera. This one is bright red, takes film, and is a 612 format. I have been experimenting with its panoramic aesthetic going out on the tops and photographing the reservoirs, old stone buildings, and walls, in the snow. They have a strange air of stillness which suits the snow.

Photo by Charlie Meecham

The pinhole camera was made by Philippe Leclerc, of Lerouge, in his Caen atelier. Leclerc’s website says that it is made for all those photographers who want a more playful and creative approach to photography. I would add that it creates a sociability not often found with digital cameras.  

Passersby often engage me in long conversations when I am out with the pinhole and they mention its seasonal colour, of course. Yet most are amazed that a photograph can be made with a simple box and a small lensless hole even though they know about the technology. I show examples of prints and it is their material beauty that is striking. The image below is a view of Pecket Well from the frozen tracks above Wadsworth.

Regeneration - The Sheffield Project 1981-1991

Steel

Virtual tour here.

The project, Regeneration, documented the changing ways of life, urban landscape and working identities of Sheffield over a period of time when the city was moving away from heavy manufacturing to the service industries. The changes occurred during the time generally known as Thatcher’s Britain, in the aftermath of the miners’ strike and a period of upheaval in society.

 Regeneration was organised by Matthew Conduit and exhibited at the Untitled Gallery (now Site) and the photographers commissioned were John Kippin, John Darwell, Mike Black, Berris Connolly, Tim Smith, Anna Fox, John Davies, Ken Phillip, Iain Stewart, Bill Stephenson, Graham Gaunt, Patrick Sutherland, Adrian Wynn, and later on, myself. Matthew Conduit has organised a contemporary exhibition looking back at this time and the remarkable body of work that these photographers generated.

 I joined the project when analogue photography was still the only option. I used two cameras, both Plaubels, including the Pro-Shift which allowed me to take very wide angle views. I was interested in the urban landscape and what this revealed about the society.

Nostalgia

This is what I wrote for the contemporary book out in October when the exhibition launches:

 “Sheffield is primarily a landscape made for work’ wrote Beatrix Campbell in the 1980s. By the end of the decade, sites of heavy manufacturing, the steel mills, and workers’ housing were vanishing, the city targeting a future of commercial enterprise, leisure, and tourism. 

The steel workers were sometimes commemorated in sculpture or intricate brickwork on the side of a building, but they became the history; gentrification was the future. The nature of work had changed in Thatcher’s Britain. I joined the project in the early 90s, seeing a transformational process made by huge earth movers and landscaping, with tree and shrub planting and post-modern architectural revamps. At the time there were expansive flat holes in the landscape, waiting for new buildings, new businesses. One of these areas was completely covered in crumbled brick, with detritus blowing in the wind - old invoices from the disappeared steelworks, and microfilm, the best way to record documents in the pre-digital era. 

 I used some of these discarded documents in the panels I made, concerned with trying to make comparisons between the history of the city and what was taking place in the late 80s. The new era and ethos seemed rather insubstantial. Meadowhall had been built and was already catering for the masses who flocked to its gold and marble corridors. A friend worked on painting the interior, which had classical allusions and a lot of ‘distressing’ because history had to be referenced. Out-of-town shopping centres had become hugely popular, largely because of easy and extensive car parking, with familiar town-centre shops, which unfortunately had moved from the high street.

 After the project I never went back to Meadowhall, and my daughter who studied in Sheffield, refused to get a job there, even though it was within easy reach of the city due to the recently built Supertram. Nonetheless, it appeared to be an exciting time for people who lived in Sheffield. In general, people took great interest in the new building programme and they would often wander out after work to see the progress. Yet, according to comments from people I met, some features were sorely missed, such as the ‘Hole in the Road’ at Castle Square, a pedestrian underpass built in the 1960s, when rapidity of movement became a town planners’ goal. 

 It can be seen in my work with a few lingering shops, the pedestrians using subways under the traffic roundabout for access. The Hole in the Road suffered in the general process of entropy, its form outlived and becoming dangerous. Shortly after, it too vanished from the landscape.”

Cutquicker

Although it was a long time ago I still have strong memories of the people I ran into who would start a conversation about the changes happening in the city. Mostly left-wing, they decried the “Thatcher ethos” which resulted in hardship when the steelworks failed.

The exhibition is showing at Weston Park, Sheffield Museums, opening on October 23rd 2020 and continuing for some months until May 3rd 2021. A book is also is published to accompany the exhibition with examples of the photographers’ work and their texts.The book has sold out but a second edition should be forthcoming.

https://www.museums-sheffield.org.uk/museums/weston-park/exhibitions/the-sheffield-project-photographs-of-a-changing-city

 Regeneration - The Sheffield Project press release (pdf)

KOLGA Tbilisi Photo

I was invited by curator Tina Schelhorn to take part in an exhibition at KOLGA Tbilisi Photo. Her idea for an exhibition was “Tales of Islands” which included Marc Räder’s “Island in Progress” about Mallorca, Osamu James Nakagawa’s work on a suicide cave in Japan and Sanne de Wilde’s work which responded to an island in the Pacific where a high proportion of the population are colourblind.  I was familiar with Marc Räder’s work which had been part of the show Mediterranean: Between Reality and Utopia at The Photographer’s Gallery in London. Tina wanted to exhibit some old work of mine from Island: The Sea Front and I was thankful to show it again as it hasn’t been on the walls for about 15 years although it toured worldwide from mid 1990s to about 2005. I began the project in 1989 when Britain was building the Channel Tunnel. At the time there was much discussion about Britain’s identity, its legacy, and whether it could really think of itself as part of Europe. The photography took me about four years to do: there are 48 locations in the series each 50 kms apart and the horizon line falls exactly in the centre of each panoramic photograph. The horizon was significant to the work, a line that appears as a boundary, yet a spatial phenomenon that doesn’t really exist. A historic piece of work but very relevant to today’s current affairs. 

The show was held in an ancient caravanserai in the Old Town of Tbilisi. Visiting Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, is pretty exotic. The city itself is a mix of historical buildings, some decaying, which have characteristic verandas, and ultra modern ‘signature’ buildings. The country lies beyond Turkey, on the Black Sea and shares a border with Azerbaijan. 

KOLGA turned out to be a much bigger festival of photography than I previously thought with many exhibitions in well-known galleries and alternative venues. There were usually three launches per night, I went to them all and they attracted crowds of people.  

One of the exhibitions that I enjoyed the most was “OSTLOOK: What to do with History?”  This exhibition was curated by Jewgeni Roppel and was a mix of documentary and more experimental fine art work. Julia Borissova’s project “Running to the Edge” used found photographs with plant material laid over the top, not a method that usually works visually for me. It was about the period of Russian emigration in the 1920s and the effect of memory. The work was quite eloquent and manipulated how one thought about the subjects of the original photographs. At the same time the addition of plant material challenged simplistic ideas about photography’s documentary role. More direct and more than a little amusing was Nils Ackermann’s “Looking for Lenin” in the same show, a documentary tracing of all the statues of Lenin that had been rejected and had disappeared from the landscape.

Among the documentary photography on show was the very hard-hitting work from “Ni Una Menos” by Karl Mancini about feminicide in Argentina. The situation, (which you can read more about on Karl’s website) is not much known about in Britain, the photographs desperately sad.

The KOLGA Award for reportage went to Mustafa Hasona. You may have seen his image from the Palestinian Rights of Return Protests of a man with a sling holding the Palestinian Flag. If not, you can find it on the KOLGA site under award winners.

Scroll down on the KOLGA site and you will find that the award for conceptual photography was given to me for “Topographies of the Image.”