I’ve been busy for some weeks finishing off my book on Hull, or perhaps I should say my first book on Hull, as ‘Still Occupied: A view of Hull’ only covers my black and white work in that city from 1977-1985, and I continued to take pictures there at least occasionally until a few years ago. Like the other books I’ve produced in the last year this is a Blurb publication, and I’m now waiting for the first copy to come back to me for the inevitable tweaks and corrections – so I’ll write more about it when it becomes available. You can already see a few of the pictures that will be in it on the web on the Urban Landscapes site.
The book has taken much longer than I expected, originally planned to come out in time for a group exhibition last autumn, which perhaps fortunately got cancelled. It took so long largely because it was on film that now needs extensive retouching before it can be used to make prints. One of the two images on this page needed a couple of hours work and is still not perfect. But now it is on digital (and I’ve made a backup) I feel much happier about its future. Digital isn’t without its problems but film is truly an unstable medium. Good inkjet prints on fine paper will probably outlast both.
But I’ve recently been working with another photographer on his book of pictures of our last royal wedding, again an event that seemed to more or less paralyse the country into sycophantic fawning, that of Charles and Di. Down in central London where he was, people were sleeping on the streets and celebrating.
Up in Hull I came across a small shop in Church Street, in what was a fairly deserted area of town following the closure of the Victoria Dock, which was perhaps celebrating the event with something of the spirit one might expect from the city that kicked off the English Civil War in 1642 when Sir John Hotham refused entry to King CharlesI.
Royal Wedding Window Display
Later I recorded the normal window display of the same shop on several occasions – and here is one of them:
Normal Window Display
As you may guess, I didn’t get an invitation to this year’s wedding, although I have had several to demonstrations against it. Not that I have any real antipathy to the two people concerned – may their marriage have a rather better future than that previous one – but frankly the whole thing is of no interest to me.
I’m not entirely against royalty, though I do think we should have nationalised their assets – and the others stolen from the people by the rest of the aristocracy long ago. Do it now and we could pay off those debts and avoid the cuts. Let’s have a monarch that rides bikes and lives in a council house. I might even photograph them then.
So I’m not sure what I’ll be doing on the big wedding day, but it certainly won’t be watching the wedding – after all none of their family came to mine. Perhaps like most of today I’ll be struggling with my next book.
