In 1991 I photographed Carnival in both black and white and in colour. I went on both days, but I think it was only on Sunday, the Children’s Day, that I took any colour pictures. Nearly all were taken on Ladbroke Grove as the floats and groups went down, often stopping for quite long periods.
I’ll post a few pictures here, but there are quite a few in the album, Notting Hill Carnival – the 1990s, starting at this one if you want to see more.
The picture above is the last colour image from 1991 in the album.
All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated, are taken by and copyright of Peter Marshall, and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.
A few more colour pictures from Notting Hill Carnival in 1990 – there are more on page 5 of the Flickr album.
This was the first year I went to Carnival, and set a pattern I followed in most years, taking the train from Hammersmith to Westbourne Park station, arriving around the middle of the day, before things really got going then walking along to All Saints Rd and photographing around there and Talbot Rd and the surrounding streets.
Later I’d walk up Portobello Rd and under the Westway and take pictures in the north of the area where the streets were less busy and I could still move around. I found the procession route in the south of the area very crowded and impossible for my kind of photography.
I think all these colour pictures were taken on the Sunday – Children’s Day, and that on Monday I worked only in black and white. Most of the pictures I made of the actual procession were on Ladbroke Grove.
If you want to look at more, and at those from later years you can go to page 5 of Notting Hill Carnival – the 1990s. Clicking on any of the pictures above will also take you to a larger version in this Flickr album.
Though I think my best pictures of Notting Hill Carnival were in black and white, most years until I moved to using digital cameras I photographed there in both black and white and colour. By 1990, when I first photographed Carnival, for colour I was exclusively using colour negative film.
I could process colour negative film myself, and by this time much of my black and white work was taken using Ilford’s chromogenic films, at first XP1 which had been introduced in 1980, then XP2 which replaced it in Spring 1991, which was designed to be processed in the standard C41 chemicals used for colour neg, though Ilford still produced its own specific processing kit just for the black and white versions.
While it was simple to contact print black and white negatives, producing these in colour from colour negatives was rather more difficult, and it was only after I’d squeezed a colour paper processing line into my diminutive darkroom in the mid 1990s that I began to do so. Even then, getting reasonably correct colour was a problem.
Before that time, I sent away my colour films for trade processing, and being a little short of cash mostly that meant using cheap non-professional processing labs, paying for processing and printing as 4″x6″ enprints. The film processing was fine, but the printing varied from good to a rainbow range of colour casts and variable contrast. Eventually I found a cheap postal amateur service that was reasonably consistent and still cost only around a third of my local pro lab.
Now I’ve digitised most of the colour negatives from the 1990 Notting Hill Carnival, and have found them rather more interesting than I expected. Having them in digital form makes it easier to work on the pictures as I could when making black and white prints, with some dodging and burning where needed.
There are a few pictures in this post, and I’ll put at least one more set from 1990 on here in another post, but if you want to look at more, and at those from later years you can go to page 5 of Notting Hill Carnival – the 1990s. Clicking on any of the pictures above will also take you to a larger version in this Flickr album.
All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated, are taken by and copyright of Peter Marshall, and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.
Some might think that pictures from 2000 have no place in an album called ‘Notting Hill Carnival – the 1990s‘, but the decade really starts with 1991 as when we move to labelling years as ‘anno Domini’ or AD the first year was 1 and not 0. It was only around 1200 that the idea of zero and ‘0’ as a number really came into European thought, though it had existed much earlier in other civilisations in Asia, the Middle East and South America. So while some celebrated the Millenium at the start of 2000, the more educated knew it really had another year to go.
But its actually just a matter of convenience and the result of a small mistake I made when I was putting together an exhibition of my first ten years at Carnival. For some reason I thought I had first taken pictures there in 1991, so this was to cover the years 1991-2000, but as I worked on the show I found I had also been there in 1990.
For the moment I’ll end this album at 2000, though probably I’ll come back later and change its name to include all those years I covered the carnival on film rather than digital, though I’m not quite sure when that was.
I’d also intended the album simply to be black and white pictures, but then I found a couple of years where I had taken few or no black and white pictures. So I’m now busily scanning colour negatives from the other years and adding them. Except for one year where I seem to have mislaid the file containing the negatives – which I’ve spend hours searching for, so far without success.
All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated, are taken by and copyright of Peter Marshall, and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.
I’ve so far digitised only a small proportion of images that I took of Carnival in 1999, though I think that those I’ve put into the Flickr album Notting Hill Carnival in the 1990s are probably the best of those I took. But I’m sure there are some other pictures worth adding later from the 600 or so black and white pictures I took over the two days – and I also made around 250 in colour.
As usual, the pictures display rather small on this site, but clicking on them will take you to a larger version on Flickr. You can see all the pictures from 1999 in the album by clicking on this link to go to the first and then clicking to go to next picture to go through the other 18.
All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated, are taken by and copyright of Peter Marshall, and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.
1997 I again photographed Notting Hill in colour, and I have yet to digitise any of the roughly 600 frames I took over the two days. I also have some more colour work from previous years I have yet to add to my Flickr album, and I will share some of those also at a later date.
En route to carnival, 1988 Peter Marshall
But in 1988 I was busy with both black and white and colour – and again there are very few of the colour images I have yet printed or digitised, including some more colour panoramic work. I have so far only scanned or digitised around 15 of the several hundreds of black and white pictures I took, some of which have appeared in the several publications and exhibitions of my carnival pictures, including the ‘The English Carnival‘ exhibition in 2008. I’ve uploaded these to the Flickr album, Notting Hill Carnival – the 1990s, but I think there are probably quite a few more pictures worth digitising when I find time
All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated, are taken by and copyright of Peter Marshall, and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.
For 1996 I was back to working with black and white, and it was a year which produced a few of my favourite images of Carnival. I’d looked at the results from the previous year and found the colour often distracting. It was the people that attracted me, not the colourful costumes.
I took around 800 black and white pictures over the two days of carnival in 1996, but cannot find a single colour image. Unlike for some of the earlier years I haven’t recently reviewed the whole set of pictures and there may be a few more to add when I do so.
You can see more of the pictures from 1996 (and other years) in my album Notting Hill Carnival in the 1990s. The pictures from 1996 start towards the bottom of page 2.
I’ll post some more from Notting Hill later in the year when I’ve added more pictures to this album.
All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated, are taken by and copyright of Peter Marshall, and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.
Notting Hill was in colour for me in 1995. Although I’d taken a few colour pictures in earlier years, this was the first year I decided to work entirely in colour – except for a few frames finishing a black and white film in one of my cameras.
I’ve never really gone back to look at the colour pictures I took in earlier years – something now on my ‘to do list’, as the black and white interested me rather more. But I think I had been encouraged to cover the event in colour by one of my potential clients – not an actual commission, but a suggestion that they might be more interested in colour, and I’d thought it would be interesting to try and see if I could do the kind of things I’d already done in black and white.
It wasn’t of course the first time I’d worked in colour. I’d taken colour pictures for as long as I’d been involved in photography, alongside black and white, but generally of rather different subjects. I’d switched from using colour transparency to colour negative film ten years before I took these pictures, but still hadn’t really worked out a good system for dealing with the work. At first I’d had everything trade processed and getting enprints. It’s a good system for the occasional film such as holiday snaps, but when you get thousands of them it becomes a little difficult to organise.
By 1985 I was developing my own colour films – along with the mainly chromogenic black and white films I was also using which could be developed in the same chemicals. Making contact sheets from colour negatives on colour paper was a little more difficult because I had to work in total darkness (or virtually so) and colour filters had to be used to expose them. The results were often not very useful, unlike those from black and white, and selecting images from them was rather hit and miss.
Last week I digitised every frame of all 18 films I took at carnival in 1985 – around 670 pictures – batch processing the results to give a roughly balanced image, discovering quite a few pictures I had previously overlooked. Around a third were worth further processing, and after eliminating some near duplicates and a further round of culling I was left with around 140 I felt were worth adding to the album Notting Hill Carnival – the 1990s. The colour work begins on page 3.
None are great pictures, though I think all have some interest. As a whole I felt they backed up my decision to work mainly in black and white in other years. But while some are similar to my black and white pictures, others do show another view of carnival.
All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated, are taken by and copyright of Peter Marshall, and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.
I had a good year at Carnival in 1994, taking some of the pictures of the event I like best, and I think rather more varied than some years, as these pictures show:
You can see more pictures from 1984 – and other years – in my Flickr album.
All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated, are taken by and copyright of Peter Marshall, and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.
We can’t go to carnival so I’m posting some pictures from previous years – today from 1991. These pictures are now on Flickr in an album of my black and white pictures from the event in 1990-2000.
Some of these pictures have already been widely published – and one has appeared this year in various publicity features about the Museum of London’s show opening this October, ‘Dub London: Bassline of a City’ such as ‘BOOM! There’s a new show about dub at the Museum of London‘ in Time Out.
I took a look back through all of the contact sheets – well over a hundred – in 2018 while I was putting together a set of images for a Café Royal book. Several of the new images I found made their way into ‘Notting Hill Carnival in the 1990s’ but many others are in the Flickr album. The book sold well, and is now only available from them in an archive set, Archive 4, a limited edition of 100 different books, costing around a thousand pounds. I still have a few copies of this and also ‘Pride Not Profit London 1993-2000’ and can supply direct to UK addresses for £8 each including postage – contact details here. Several other of my books are still available at Café Royal.
All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated, are taken by and copyright of Peter Marshall, and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.
