Category: Scanned Negatives

Halifax Before Colour

I did a thing last year for the Courier about iconic images of Halifax. This wasn't amongst my chosen photos, but perhaps it should have been. It's the way the footbridge slices an almost naked Beacon Hill into segments - it's Halifax before colour came.

Power To The People

This is Elland about 50 years ago. I was taking photos at a wedding at St Mary's, and I climbed up in the flats opposite to get some shots of the wedding party as they came out of the church. It was the view down the Calder Valley to the Power Station that caught my … Continue reading Power To The People

Cheap, Fire-proof, And Deadly

I can't quite remember where I took this, so let's just say it's Calderdale. Those asbestos garages were a distinctive part of the landscape back in the 1960s/70s: cheap, fireproof .... and deadly!

Headscarves In Halifax

Sometimes it is the poor photos, the blurred photos, the crumpled and skew-whiff photos, that seem to capture the mood and feeling of a time better than the most pinprick sharp compositions. I took this in Halifax in 1965 - that's the Borough Market in the background - and it sings of its era. If … Continue reading Headscarves In Halifax

The Soot-Black Horse

I'm still in Halifax, and it's still 1965 (or perhaps 1966). The White Horse is anything but white, nor is it sand-stone clean as it is today. It has Halifax's industrial past seared into its surface, and the man by the lamp post is weighed down by too much work and not enough life.

A Walk Down Russel Street

As I scan my way through a strip of old negatives, I am constantly amending decisions I have made about when and where some of the photographs were taken. Many of these negatives are over fifty years old, and over the years they have gathered their own collection of scratches, dust spots and blemishes. I … Continue reading A Walk Down Russel Street

Man At A Bus Stop (The AI Wars)

I received an invitation to give Adobe Firefly - their new Artificial Intelligence generated creative system - a try, and at the same time I was trying to work out what to do with a rather tired old photograph I took almost sixty years ago. The photograph was taken in Halifax and shows a bus … Continue reading Man At A Bus Stop (The AI Wars)

That Look, That Question

This is a version of a photograph I took back in 1966. It wasn't a particularly good photograph from a technical perspective when I took it, and it hasn't improved with time. It is out of focus, indifferently composed, and of marginal interest as a subject. I can neither remember where exactly in Halifax it … Continue reading That Look, That Question

Fire In Halifax (1968)

I came across a fire near the bottom of Hanson Lane by chance one day back in 1968, when I was walking into town from the Library. The photographs I took were just a record of a chance event, but over half a century later, they have become something of a social record of the … Continue reading Fire In Halifax (1968)