Posts Tagged ‘Transparencies’

Hull Colour – 6

Friday, July 17th, 2020
Barges on River Hull and Croda works, Hull 81-04-Hull-030_2400
Barges on River Hull and Croda works, Hull 1981

A busy scene on the River Hull, probably taken in 1981, though the dates on these images come from the album they are filed in and are sometimes not the exact year, and this could possibly have been made earlier.

The slide mount crops the image slightly and I’m sure that the actual transparency will have included the top of the water tank on the Croda silo at the Isis Oil Mills, but it would have greatly slowed down the photographing of this and the other slides to have removed the slides from their mounts – and would have made handling them much more tricky. And the macro lens and bellows combination I was using with the older Nikon slide holder was fine for mounted slides but could not give proper coverage of the full 24x36mm.

Perhaps because of the problem of slide mounts, many SLR cameras, though marketing on the benefits of actually viewing through the taking lens rather than the separate optics of the rangefinder Leica or twin-lens Rolleiflex had viewfinders that cropped the images and were actually less accurate in their framing than the Leica. Though even the Leica white line frames never quite exactly represented the area that would appear on film (though some lenses came very close) making something of a nonsense the insistence of many photographers of printing the edges of the negative to give a black frame because this represented how they had seen the picture when they pressed the button. It was always more an aesthetic decision.

The silo was still there last time I walked along Bankside, but the location from where I took this picture was behind a locked gate and the buildings to the right of the silo had gone and there was only one vessel, Cargill’s edible oil tanker Swinderby, moored along this reach of the river.

Works, River Hull 81-04-Hull-032_2400
Works, River Hull 1981

I can’t remember now where I took this picture of a wharf across the RIver Hull, somewhere in Hull. But I do remember being attracted by what appears to have been built as an incredibly tall doorway, though it does now appear to have been blocked by a pipe that emerges through it at a little under half its height.

Was it, I mused, made for giraffes?

542 Hessle Rd and phone box, Hull 81-04-Hull-034_2400
542 Hessle Rd and phone box, Hull 1981

Hull Corporation was one of 55 local authorities to bid for a licence to provide telephone services in their local area in 1902 and opened its first telephone exchange in a former public baths two years later. While other local authorities who had been granted licences soon abandoned or failed, Hull continued its service after the Postmaster General had gained a monopoly elsewhere across the country.

And when in 1936 the Post Office launched a new red phone box designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott to commemorate the Silver Jubilee of King George V and decided that all phone boxes across the country should be red, Hull decided while adopting the new design to keep their traditional colour of cream and green, eventually moving to all cream. Hull City Telephone Department continued to innovate – and introduced a message from Santa in 1952. The council hived off the service into a fully owned separate company, Kingston Communications (HULL) PLC in 1987, which was floated on the Stock Exchange in 1999. In 2007 Hull Council sold its remaining stake in the business which changed its name to KCOM Group PLC.

The scene on Hessle Rd is still recognisable, but the shop has changed and no longer has the colour scheme and awning that attracted my attention, and although there is still a phone box I think it may have moved a few feet.

Lincoln Castle, Hessle Forshore, Hessle 81-04-Hull-039_2400
Lincoln Castle, Hessle Forshore, Hessle 1981

The paddle steamer Lincoln Castle was now beached on the Humber foreshore at Hessle, close to the Humber Bridge, and was now a restaurant where we went for afternoon tea. I made it into a rather strange landscape of distant jagged hills in this picture.

Humber Bridge, from Barton on Humber82hull135_2400
Humber Bridge, from Barton on Humber 1982

And of course we went across the Humber Bridge which took us to Barton-on-Humber. Where we walked around a bit and found there wasn’t a great deal there. I took a few photographs, mainly of the Humber Bridge, and I rather like this almost monochrome view.

More pictures on Flickr in Hull Colour 1972-85.

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.

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Hull Colour – 5

Thursday, July 16th, 2020
Wilmington Bridge, Hull 80hull102
Wilmington Bridge, Hull 19802

I’ve photographed this listed railway swing bridge across the River Hull many times, but I like this particular detail image not just because it gets away from a more standard view and for its colour, but because of the way it puts the bridge into its now largely gone industrial context.

The bridge was built to carry the lines from Hull east to the two North Sea seaside towns of Hornsea and Withernsea. Coming out from Hull Paragon the line turned north to a level crossing at the end of Spring Bank, close to the junction of Princes Avenue. Next to this was Botanic Station, where my wife in her youth would catch a train to Hornsea for the family’s annual week at the seaside. The line then swung east to Stepney Station, close to Stepney Lane on Beverley Road and then on to this bridge across the RIver Hull. The lines to Withernsea and Hornsea diverged on the other side of the river.

Sadly, Dr Beeching, an firm evangelist for the car and the motor trade, put an end to all that and both lines closed to passenger services in October 1964, a few months before my first trip to Hull. Goods services continued to use the bridge and track as far as Hedon until 1968, and all too often I found myself sitting on the top of a bus waiting for the crossing gates to open. In front of me during the evening rush hour then would be hundreds of men on bicycles on their way home.

Nowadays the bridge seldom swings for traffic along the river, though it remains in working order and will do so when necessary. And although there are no trains, the bridge is still in use for cyclists and pedestrians.

Sculcoates, Hull 80hull132
Sculcoates, Hull 1980

An evening glow lights up this view of Sculcoates, with the cabin of the Wilmington Bridge at its right-hand edge and the tall silo of the British Extracting Company Ltd at its left. I’ve not been able to find out why the water tank on its roof has a logo with a crown on top of a stylised letter R – please let me know if you know.

I think this view is from the embankment of another disused railway line which took the Hull, Barnsley and West Riding Junction Railway and Dock Company line to its Hull terminus at Cannon St. This had been intended simply as a goods station, but the company (later more simply known as the Hull and Barnsley railway) ran out of money to construct a passenger station closer to the city centre. The line which ran here on the west side of the Beverley and Barmston Drain was a short spur down from Beverley Road Junction on the line still in use for traffic to the eastern docks.

Barges in Old Harbour, Hull 81-04-Hull-020_2400
Barges in Old Harbour, Hull 1981

Another view of barges moored in the Old Harbour of the River Hull, secured to each other by some bright orange ropes. I’m sure that some of my more imaginative psychogeographic friends would see it as some kind of weird psychic circuitry.

Red Doors, Pattern Store, Hull 81-04-Hull-022_2400
Red Doors, Pattern Store, Hull 1981

I like the idea of a ‘pattern store’. If you ‘Google’ it you will mainly get sewing patterns, but I think this one will have been at some kind of engineering works. Patternmakers were particularly important in shipbuilding, railway works and foundries, and the patterns they made were usually wooden cut-out shapes which recorded the exact size and shape to which metal had to be cut or cast for a particular purpose. Pattern stores might also be used to hold plans and drawings.

McGrath Bros, Fish Curers, St Mark's Sq, St James Street, 1981 81-04-Hull-023_2400
McGrath Bros, Fish Curers, St Mark’s Sq, St James Street, 1981

Unlike the previous picture which I have no idea of where I took it, I can locate this painted gate fairly precisely to St Mark’s Square. Off St James’s St, which is off the Hessle Rd, this bears little resemblance to its Venetian namesake, but is rather more accurately a square, though only two sides carry its name.

McGraths, later ‘Shears (McGraths)’ was a member of the HULL Fish Merchants Protection Association, and although the Cod Wars had more or less killed Hull’s fishing industry, when I took this picture the auctions at the fish dock were still the largest fresh fish auctions in the country, handling over two thirds of our Icelandic fish imports as well as the smaller amounts landed by trawlers still operating from Hull and fish brought by lorry from other ports. Hull got a new state-of-the-art fish fishmarket in 2001, but in 2011 Icelandic fish agent Atlantic Fresh abandoned Hull’s Fishgate for Grimsby.

I love the pointing hand with its flourish directing the reader to the company’s Office.

Barge Torcha and River Hull, Bankside, Hull 81-04-Hull-028_2400
Barge Torcha and River Hull, Bankside, Hull 1981

I read the name of the barge incorrectly from a black and white version of this picture as it is TORCHA and not TORCH , but here is what I wrote about it.

A little downstream from the Hull Exhaust Centre, visible at left was another viewpoint, I think from a derelict wharf on the River Hull. This image, looking upstream, shows barge Torch, with number 22, owned by Hull’s Gillyott and Scott, a major tug and lighter owner formed in 1964 by amalgamation of the five companies of William Gilyott, John A. Scott, T.F. Wood, Furleys and John Deheer. Gilyott and Scott (Transport) Ltd also owned lorries. The barges are said to have been sold to Dave Hornshaw of Hornshaw Water Transport in Goole.
 
The buildings on the East bank are some of those on the Morley Street ultramarine works, then still part of Reckitt’s – with Hull’s tallest chimney a little out of the frame to the right. Most or all have now been demolished.

Torcha is Spanish for torch, and according to one dictionary in English is a mixture of mud with straw and cob used for roofing. It’s not a word I’ve heard used but the connection with mud would certainly be appropriate for a barge the the River Hull or Humber. Cob is a more usual term of the the mix of clay, sand and straw used in building, the daub in wattle and daub which often also contained cow dung.

More pictures at Hull Colour 1972-85.

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.

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My old slides

Sunday, May 17th, 2020

I took my first colour pictures years before I was a photographer. I’d long had an interest in photography, assiduously reading Amateur Photographer from cover to cover in the local library each week and around the age of 13 had saved pennies from my very limited pocket money each week, finally managing to buy a Halina 35x, which looked like a real camera. But it was around 4 years later that I could afford to buy my first film and send it away for processing, an Ilford black and white film which was returned with 36 postcard-size deckle-edge lustre prints, mainly of ancient oak trees in Richmond Park, though one of my father in our back garden in tie and cardigan uneasily holding a garden fork still adorns an oval hole in one of those family composites put together by my wife on our landing.

But the second film I took, I think the following year, was Agfa colour transparency. Most or all of it was taken of a girlfriend, an aspiring model, sitting in a blossom covered peach tree (grown from a stone) again in our back garden. I’m not sure if any have survived and the romance certainly didn’t, perhaps largely because as a penniless student I didn’t have a sports car and couldn’t take her to clubs, restaurants and pubs like the older men she met.

For the next few years I was a film a year man, a roll of colour transparencies taken on holidays and outings. I did take a couple of rolls of black and white when still a penniless student, but my photography was rather more curtailed when I dropped the camera in the lake at Versailles on my first overseas holiday, a week in a student hostel on the outskirts of Paris with my future wife. Fished out after some minutes underwater it never worked reliably again, the leaf shutter closing when it felt like it rather than following the set speed.

Around five years later I could afford to replace it with a cheap Russian SLR, and by then I’d also taken a short darkroom course and was living in a flat where I could set up a temporary darkroom in the kitchen to develop film and make black and white prints and my photography really began. But I continued to take the occasional colour slide film, mainly still for holidays. And by the time I really began photography seriously I was usually carrying two camera bodies, one with black and white and the second colour film.

Until 1985, all of that colour film was transparency film, partly because at that time most publications would only accept slides, and I aspired to have my pictures published event if they seldom where. Most of it, largely on cost grounds, was in those early years taken on film which used the E3 process, and it hasn’t aged well. E4 which replaced it towards the end of the ’70s has done better and what little Kodachrome I took (it was more expensive) best of all. Of course my slides have been stored in far from ideal conditions at home which will have accelerated their ageing.

Thanks to the Covid lockdown, I have managed to complete the scanning of all those slides which I can find which seem worth scanning. A few in the past were scanned on a proper film scanner at around 20 minutes per image; a few years ago I found I could get acceptable results from my Epson 750PRO flatbed (though only by not using its automatic location which crops unacceptably) but have now found a bellows and macro-lens much faster and better. Retouching to remove spots and mould can still be time-consuming, and I’ll only do this when I need to use the images. I’ve found little if any gain in cleaning the slides other than with an air blower – and using cleaning fluids and cloths seems to make those in card mounts even dirtier.

At the end of last month I wrote a little about a cycle ride up the Loire valley with some pictures on Kodachrome from 1975. The pictures in this post are from Paris in 1973 and have survived better than most I took in the early years. You can see them larger by right-clicking and choosing to open them in a new tab.

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.

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Stephen Shore small camera

Tuesday, March 3rd, 2020

Stephen Shore is one of the photographers featured in Sally Eauclaire’s ‘The New Color Photography‘ published in 1981, though I had seen his work a few years earlier, certainly in Modern Photography magazine and possibly elsewhere. He also featured among the ‘New Topographics’ featured in the presentation by Lewis Baltz at his workshop I went to. Euclaire’s book certainly can be described as seminal, a significant milestone in the acceptability of colour photography as a serious medium for photographic artists – and perhaps more importantly for museums to collect and galleries to sell.

Of course colour in photography was not new. The first photographs had been taken in colour over a hundred years previously with technical demonstrations by James Clerk Maxwell and Louis Ducos du Hauron, and since the early days of the Daguerreotype colour had been added to photographs by hand. Autochrome, the first fully practical single plate additive colour processes was introduced commercially in 1907, and both Kodak and Agfa marketed their subtractive processes which were the basis of modern colour film photography in 1936.

Colour became used increasingly in some commercial photography from the 1950s on, and increasingly by amateurs in the 1960s. Its use by photojournalists was restricted not by the availability of film but by the huge bulk of publications still being printed in black and white for cost reasons, but as magazines changed it became more common.

I took one or two colour films (perhaps one per summer holiday) before I could afford to go seriously into photography, but when that became possible, partly because I was earning money rather than being a penniless student, it was also because I had learnt how to do photography on the cheap, loading cassettes from bulk film, developing and printing my own work – largely on surplus and often out-of-date paper. Colour was still expensive in comparison, though later I learnt to use bulk colour film and develop it myself, using cheaper alternatives to Kodak’s E3 and later E4 and E6 chemicals.

Kodachrome in some ways remained the gold standard, or rather the yellow box standard, but a film that was impossible to home process and which remained expensive to use. So though I used the occasional roll (mainly for those holiday snaps) and was fortunate enough to win a brick of the stuff in a magazine competition, largely I worked with cheaper films which could be brought in 50 or 100ft tins.

But certainly back in the 70s I was serious about colour, even if I took fewer colour pictures than black and white, and if the results weren’t always particularly successful. I studied colour, not in an art school but at home with books such as Johannes Itten’s ‘The Art of Color’, first published in 1920 when he was leading the “preliminary course” at the Bauhaus:

Itten theorized seven types of color contrast and devised exercises to teach them. His color contrasts include[d] (1) contrast by hue, (2) contrast by value, (3) contrast by temperature, (4) contrast by complements  (neutralization), (5) simultaneous contrast (from Chevreuil), (6) contrast by saturation (mixtures with gray), and (7) contrast by extension (from Goethe).”

David Burton, quoted by Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johannes_Itten

When I went to teach in a sixth form college in 1980 I found the art students there carrying out exactly the same exercises devised by Itten.

So while I appreciated the colour portfolios that were published in Euclaire’s book I reacted rather negatively to the suggestions that this was the beginning of serious colour photography – and I think we are now much more aware of earlier colour work than was then the case.

I began thinking about Stephen Shore and ‘The New Color Photography’ on reading an article online at The Guardian by Sean O’Hagan, Stephen Shore: ‘People would chase me off their lawns with my Leica’. Although Shore became well-known for the work he made in colour with a 10×8 camera, he was also carrying a Leica with him. It’s an interesting article that tells me more about the photographer, though I don’t think it illuminates his work in any respect for me, but perhaps may for those coming to him anew.

I’ve not yet seen the book, Transparencies: Small Camera Works 1971-1979 which is published on March 5th, but the preview suggests it is rather more interesting than the small selection of images illustrating The Guardian article.

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