Saturday threatened to be a mess of brooding skies and high humidity. What relief came was in the form of a brief mid-morning downpour that saw the early afternoon brighten, signalling me to grab my camera bag and hop on the number 26 city express. For some time now I’ve been planning to photograph the industrial outskirts of the city, home to a number of beleagered old buildings in various states of post-industrial collapse. The juxtaposition of the River Soar , canal, and this miscellany of gap-toothed architectural crones suggested photographic gold, if only I could get the right exposure , so it was with a tempered sense of excited expectation that I spooled a roll of HP5+ and pushed through the brambles.
Once again I took the canon T90, quickly becoming my go-to camera fitted with a solid 100mm lens with macro capability. I picked this up on Ebay after taking a sixty quid gamble, which turns out to be money well spent. The macro adds a couple of additional degrees of close-up focus, but the overall lens is crystal clear and allows me to zoom through 30-100mm which gives a lot of good coverage.. First introduced in early 1980s the T90 is a great, truly great camera, and following its launch quick established itself as the standard for professional photographers. It also garnered a deserved reputation for being incredibly robust, hence it’s nickname, The Tank, and would have no doubt been a welcome addition to any professional arsenal. The hard plastic shell was ergonomically designed, foreshadowing a minor revolution in product design, and sits well in the hand despite its bulk. To my eye it’s not the most attractive of cameras, although back in the 1980s it would have looked strikingly original. It’s also pretty heavy, especially with a large lens, but who cares. It has lots of what we would now consider essential features, but for its time it was an innovative step forward and even thirty years later is a fantastic analogue camera. Spot metering, automatic winder, a simple thumb wheel to navigate menus, and all easy to use and intuitive. I love my digital camera, but I’m still learning what the many of the functions actually do, whereas the T90 is sophistication carefully distilled into a miraculous plastic brick of a camera. I bought mine second-hand (Ebay) and immediately discovered that the shutter was stuck, frozen in magnetic rictus which produced a sad whirring non-click when the shutter release button was depressed. A quick google search revealed that the trusty T90, for all its rugged versatility, likes to be used, and has a tendency to lock up when left on a shelf for long periods of time. At thirty plus years of age we can, I’m sure, forgive a few arthritic idiosyncrasies. Happily, I found a fix online, which involves demagnetising and then re-magnetising the electromagnet that controls the shutter. It sounds complicated but really isn’t. It took a few attempts but eventually the camera began to fire.
So armed, I descended into the eerily post-apocalyptic world of the industrial outskirts. These places often have a somewhat uniform familiarity – ruins and boarded shop windows interspersed with franchises that seem to survive like barnacles on a sinking ship. Other post-industrial flora included ubiquitous takeaways, a couple of lively pop-up carwashes in derelict forecourts, s tanning salon and the occasional “bargain booze” off license. I saw two abandoned pubs with steel shuttered windows, the slow death of the local boozer being a particularly poignant signifier of decline. But there was beauty here too. The river looked to be in good health, freckled with lilies and the trailing fingers of weeping willows. A couple of swans were quietly rooting around in the weeds, their long necks and large black feet rising and sinking as they shunted against the current. I photographed what I could using the T90’s multiple exposure option in the hope of producing an interesting confluence of images (for the record, these didn't work at all). The T90 allows you to set the number of multiple exposures up to a maximum of six, and having recently read John Blakemore’s book Black and White Photography Workshop having also taken his two-day printing masterclass at The Photo Parlour in Nottingham with Dan Wheeler, I was keen to impart layers of movement into my landscape images using ME. This is one of the things that I have come to value in film photography – the sense of play and not knowing what the outcome will be.
Being new to urban and/or industrial photography I tried to compose the images using the same pre-visualisation techniques that John Blakemore had demonstrated. Amongst the photographs that didn't turn out was a single shot of a large iron door hanger that had worn a deep scar into the brickwork of a school building. My difficulties with devloping the film continue, especially in the case of trying to eliminate water spots from the negatives. I've tried washing agents and a long soak in free running water, but after scrapping two sets of negatives with a squeegee I'm loathed to risk anything remotely abrasive going anywhere near my negs.
Despite a few technical hiccups, it was a productive trip and I fully intend to explore further along the Soar as the autumn approaches. Having developed this film, it's evident that my double exploures haven't worked at all and have resolved into a fuzzy mess. So it's back to the books to review techniques. Freehanding the shots wouldn't have helped, but I didn't want to lug a tripod around with me.
The reflected images of industrial architecture on the soar and canal are a nice play on the industrial/natural binary, although the concept of a canal is an interesting synthesis of the two. The term "re-wilding" comes to mind, although without its full intent, even if I do sense something real surviving here in the scar tissue of the city.
