|
Funny place Rochdale. My hometown. An island
of Liberalism since the 19th century and John Bright's model
cotton mills with workers' children's day nurseries. Home
of larger than life Liberal MP Cyril Smith in the late 20th
century. Yet curiously staid and straight laced with terraced
streets, enviable working class community spirit, and a vast
Gothic style town hall reflecting its prosperous textile past.
I walked on the wide Esplanade fronting this grand edifice
in the early 1970s watching faces. And were they a picture!
Grouped there was an open air exhibition of 'modern' art.
(What does that term actually mean? Or 'post modern'?) Representational
most of the sculptures in many media definitely weren't. The
abstract twists, turns, colours and textures challenged preconceptions;
and, shock horror, the only non-abstract piece was a life-sized
properly-pink, in-the-buff, nude woman.
Rochdalians wandered through the pieces with fascination,
bafflement, pomposity, embarrassment, amusement, and shock
running across successive faces as they passed in front of
my viewfinder. This was a natural hunting ground for me to
wander with Tri-X loaded SLR for hand held impulse shots.
It had to be Tri-X of course. All my hero photographers used
it - people like Don McCullin with his monochrome images from
Cyprus, Vietnam, Belfast, and the mean streets of working
class Britain that had the impact of a stun gun between the
eyes. And it had to be teamed with D76, not ID11, identical
as that was then. Somehow the British developer just didn't
have the excitement and romance of the American fluid.
David Bailey, then the shock guy who changed the rules of
fashion photography in 'Swinging Britain' with exciting new
ways of seeing, captured those images on the film in the green
and yellow cassette
And it was a fact that Kodak's Tri-X dominated press use here,
particularly Fleet Street. Ilford's successive HP3 and HP4,
unfairly, found it hard to get a look in. HP5 started to change
that, and HP5 Plus still more, but by this time colour negative,
and then digital, had started to change the rules of the press
game anyway. Even stranger was the fact that not just any
Tri-X would do (it was made in several Kodak factories around
the world I think). It had to be American manufactured
Tri-X.
Continue ...
|
