Most of my photographs from the late 1970s and early 1980s were made in England, though quite a few outside London. After I moved to Staines in 1974 I joined a photographic club a few miles away and met up with a group of its more rebellious younger members.
We organised monthly group trips, when usually four or five of us would travel to various locations to spend a Sunday taking photographs. Each month one of the group would come up with a suggestion, and those who were interested would meet up early to travel, usually in people’s cars. We would bring the pictures we took back to monthly group meeting to pull each other’s work to pieces in sometimes rather bluntly critical terms.
Numbers varied, according to the popularity of the destination. Partly because I didn’t own a car (I sold the only one I ever owned back in the late 1960s when I became interested in the environment) the trips I suggested and led were always in London, using public transport – and rather less popular. On at least one occasion I was the only person to turn up, and I had a very good day!
More popular were the outings to more scenic locations, and I enjoyed these too. They included Stonehenge and Avebury, some rather desolate areas of the Kent and Essex coasts, the Sussex coast and Surrey Woods and more. We also made a couple of weekend trips, staying overnight at B&Bs.
The group – which had to leave the club – became a group of independent photographers with the name Framework continued until 1993 and over the years organised almost 20 exhibitions, but the group outings came to an end I think in the early 1980s, probably because most of us were seriously into our own projects.
Most of these slides from around 40 years ago need considerable retouching to remove ingrained dirt and mould spots which attack the colour, and in some the dyes used in the images have faded beyond restoration. I think the quality of the chemicals used in their development, both those I used at home and some of those lab developed was rather variable. I’ve worked on these images in Photoshop to produce the results above, but it isn’t always possible to produce an really natural looking result. Some of course may have been taken largely because of the unusual lighting at the time, and some films that I occasionally used – such as Orwo – were incapable of producing realistic colour.
I’ll put more of my old colour images on Flickr shortly.
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.