Throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, the Northeast of England was known as a titan of heavy industry. Coal mines and shipyards defined the region, providing employment and prosperity for countless families. In 1923, 170,000 miners worked in County Durham, whilst Smith’s Dock on the River Tees launched more than 900 vessels across its 80-year-existence. As post-WWII deindustrialization turned to mass closures in the 1980s, carried out in the face of mass protests during the Miners’ Strike, the occupations that once defined the area began to crumble. It is in these circumstances that photographer Ian MacDonald (b.1946) began to capture the people and places of the area he was born in. His work documents the waning years of Northeastern industry and considers the people who bore the brunt of this political and social upheaval. A new retrospective of the artist’s prolific career is now being shown across both Sunderland Museum & Winter Gardens and the Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art. Fixing Time celebrates the unique eye and warmth with which he treats his subjects and draws attention to the depth and range of his oeuvre. We spoke to the artist about his signature style, why he chose to photograph the Northeast and how his work is influenced by his own history.
A: What first drew you to photography?
IM: I developed a passion for photography in the late 1950’s, whilst on a family holiday in Whitby. After beach days and following our evening meal, I was allowed the freedom of wander the town’s streets. Here I distinctly remember coming across the photographs of Frank Meadow Sutcliffe in a shop in Skinner Street. I was enthralled by them and they made a big impact on me. Nearly a decade later, I purchased a Sutcliffe photograph from a small house sale in Whitby, it became first of many acquisitions into my photographic collection. That photograph cost me three half crowns.
A: You developed a signature style of using traditional black-and-white film and print making techniques. How did this come about? Why do you prefer to work in this style?
IM: It may be called a signature style now but when I attended Art College aged 21 in 1968, after working for five years in local industry, it was what was available. I wanted to be a painter and follow in the style of the Impressionists. At the college, photography was one of the available subject areas to study, alongside Graphic Design, printmaking, film studies and life drawing. I did eventually study fine art, a trip to the National Gallery is always high on my agenda when going to London, but I found in the early 1970’s that conceptual art was all the rage and a significant area of the curriculum.
The photography department offered a certain sense of sanity and the opportunity to respond directly through a camera to what most interested me. The long-term loan of a 4 x 5 Sinar P kit enabled me to get to grips with using such a beast, but the most important lessons I learned were in building an image on the ground glass screen, and of the value of taking time over composition. I invested so much time using large format, setting up a darkroom and having a dedicated space to work in; I think it was inevitable that my photography would evolve in this style. Most important was the kind of truth I found in what I was able to say through the photographs I was making. A good large format negative – even a bad one sometimes – can have such an impact that I was constantly satisfied with what I was able to say.
A: Much of your work has been dedicated to capturing the life of working-class communities, and the rise and fall of industry in Teesside and Cleveland. Why did you want to focus on this aspect of 20th century life in Britain?
IM: There was nothing pre-planned about how I came to photograph what I did. I simply responded to what I found fascinating in the life. I have trouble with the term working-class, I do not see people has having a class, they are all people, they live and work in particular places many of which I am very inspired by. In the years that I began my working life you could start a job on Monday, finish on Friday and have a new job the following Monday. The early sixties were buzzing, I had a motor bike, a girlfriend and enjoyed going dancing, nothing was further from my mind than the demise of industry. Throughout my student years I worked very lucratively in local industry. Much of my drive to photograph the way I did had its roots in those years. On refection I wished to pay homage to my father and grandfathers, who all worked in these industries. I wished to make photographs that honoured the lives of those I grew up around. The work arose from a deeply felt passion to make sense of my surroundings.
A: You’ve said that you don’t want to be labelled as a ‘documentary’ photographer. How would you like people to see your work?
IM: Throughout my life I have resisted being pinned down. Such terms as ‘documentary photographer’ are statements telling people what to expect, telling people what you are. I use a camera to respond to life around me. I guess people will say what they wish and respond in their way to what they see, so I must not grumble, that is their prerogative. The feedback, so far, to Fixing Time has been tremendous. These people do not say what a wonderful documentary photograph, they say I like these photographs because they remind me of something, they stimulate my memory, and I am able to identify with these pictures. It’s a response much like I felt myself when I first saw Sutcliffe’s images.
A: You’ve photographed many places that are now gone, some you took in the final weeks of operation such as Smith’s Dock Shipyard. Why was it so important to capture these places before they closed?
IM: It is strange that most of what I have photographed in terms of land or townscape has now gone. The very rapid change, looking back, has dominated our sense of a place’s value. The Smith’s Dock photographs came about as a direct response to the announcement of the closure of the yard. Shipyards worked from order to order; this closure was the end, no more orders would come in. My uncle worked in Smith’s throughout the war and beyond. He wished to serve in the navy, like his brothers, but as a tradesman Smith’s was his navy. When I left school I applied for an apprenticeship in the yard but failed, so the yard had always had a presence in my life. A place I’d always wished to photograph, it became imperative on the announcement of closure that it should happen. Access was granted and I spent six months making photographs up to closure and capturing what remained before that was swept away.
A: How does your drawing influence your photography?
IM: Drawing has played a significant role in how I look at what is around me. When making a drawing in the landscape you have to confront, in a very different way to simply being in the landscape, what you see. The time scale is important. When spending four, five or even six hours sat outside working on a drawing a wide variety of happenings occur; the light will change, the sun will go in and out and move around, it may rain, bird calls form a background noise. These things give a different sense of what the landscape is. In making the drawing, which is not in any sense about making ‘art’, you are trying to distil the location into an understanding of space, depth and shape. This means that when it comes to creating photographs there is a deeper sense of knowledge of your surroundings that previously wasn’t there.
A: You’ve said that your work is, in part, to pay homage to your father and grandfather. How does your own personal history influence your work?
IM: My whole practice as a photographer is embedded in identity and then in making this sense of identity available through exhibitions, books, greetings cards, talks and what ever else I am able to do. It has not so much shaped my practice but is my practice. My personal history, described so far, totally shapes my view of the world. It is what I have, what I own and as such it informs what I attempt to do through making photographs. I say making photographs as opposed to taking photographs because in every way I feel I make the image. I build up associations with what and whom I photograph. Rarely do I create pictures of people without their knowledge. I am not a fly on the wall, rather a wasp in their jam!
A: Fixing Time includes portraits captured in secondary schools across England over a span of 35 years. What drew you to this project?
I began making photographs of youngsters in schools as one of the many ways of recording my teaching practice in 1977. I was teaching Art, including some photography. I put together a small dark room in the pottery room store, behind the kiln, not the best of places. The youngsters made amazing photographs by encouraging them to look at their own environment. We eventually organised exhibitions in local art galleries, as well as in libraries and in the school itself. All this is a way of saying how inspirational I found the young people I was interacting with. I loved their attitude to school, how they adapted the uniform to suit their character, how they took what school threw at them on the chin. So I began making portraits of the youngsters as well as environmental images around the school estate. I taught for six years full time then part time for the next 20. This gave me a basic income and freed me up to carry out personal projects, including the likes of Smith’s Dock and the Blast Furnace.
A: The exhibition includes 35 years of work, if you could only choose one photograph from the show to display, which would it be?
One photograph I always see as significant is the portrait of Ken Robinson standing by his cabin at Greatham Creek on Teesmouth. This photograph has so many of the elements I strive to put into my work. As I mentioned earlier I rather consider photographs are built, rather than taken. This photograph is very carefully constructed on the ground glass screen of the stand camera, which I did by encouraging Ken to stand where he did, by making him feel comfortable with his position and by relating his position to the background of the reflection in the cabin window. I’d quite seriously studied the painted portraits of the Italian Renaissance as an art student and feel the picture reflected, in the window of the cabin, is an element the Italian painters used to give a relationship to the environment of the sitter.
A: Could you tell us about the process of putting this exhibition together?
The exhibition Fixing Time is large, spread over two venues, with close to 200 images, mainly photographs but also a number of drawings, maps and related ephemera. After an initial enquiry from Sunderland two curators visited the studio at Grosmont to look through a range of available work. I saw the exhibition as an opportunity to show case the beginnings of my practice of photography as well as work created around the exploration of two heavy industries on Teesside. Following quite extensive talks with Jon Weston, curator of NGCA, a decision was made to create small rooms within both galleries to help define and separate various bodies of work but for these bodies to be interrelated within the themes of the exhibition. I drew quite extensive plans for laying out the show, which had the advantage of concentrating my mind about sequence and also about what could be eliminated.
A: What would you like people to take away from visiting Fixing Time?
The very interesting thing to me about exhibitions is that people take the sum of their own personal experience, understanding and vision into looking at what you have created. I have no wish to dictate what people should look at but equally recognise that the exhibition takes on my form and feelings for what I have created over many years. The hope is that the way I relate to the landscape and to the people in it may strike a chord with the viewer and that their sense of their own place in this landscape may be enriched as a result.
Fixing Time is at Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art and Sunderland Museum & Winter Gardens until 3 November: sunderlandculture.org.uk
Words: Emma Jacob
Image Credits:
Redcar Blast furnace, 2.00am Midsummer night, 1986. Photograph. Courtesy of the artist.
Burner, Mark Dewse, standing by a 40 ton crane, Smith’s Dock shipyard 1986. Photograph. Courtesy of the artist.
Swans in the River Tees by Smith’s Dock outfitting berth, Boxing Day 1986. Photograph. Courtesy of the artist.
Canteen staff catching up on the day at the end of their shift, Redcar Blast furnace, Autumn 1983. Photograph. Courtesy of the artist.
Easter Monday, Whitby 1970. Photograph. Courtesy of the artist.
