It was probably 1975, or it
could have been early 1976. It was probably a Saturday. I was in Stockport
walking down Wellington Road South towards the square. I had a camera loaded
with black and white film. I was looking for scenes to photograph. A flâneur with a machine for
seeing.
By coincidence, there was a
bride and bridegroom walking up the hill in the opposite direction. They looked
as if they had just got married and were heading towards a reception. The bride
wore a white dress and the groom a dark suit. I don’t know how they came to be
walking there, but behind them a line of disused a coal-staithes extended from
the station and stopped short of the main road. These Victorian brick
structures were coated in coal dust and the contrast with the bride’s white
wedding dress was marked. I thought of taking a photograph, hesitated, and then
the moment was lost.
They passed me and carried on
up the hill. Even today I think that if I had taken a picture, it could have
been one of my ‘best’. The scene was redolent of northern industry. The coal
staithes had been built to allow railway wagons to empty their loads into horse-drawn
wagons beneath them. They connoted industrialisation, and a huge northern
heritage now lost to globalisation. The nearby christie's hat works is now a
museum.
The couple were roughly my
age. How have they fared in the post-industrial 21st century? Perhaps
he has spent the last twenty years driving around as a ‘white-van man’ and
perhaps she works in an office looking at spreadsheets on a computer screen.
Factory work was never all that great anyway. Regardless of these clichés, the
non-existent photograph of their newly married selves would have gained curiosity
value over the years. The coal-staithes would now appear quite archaic and the
choice of walking away from a wedding might be seen as prosaic. The staithes were
demolished in the 1990s and replaced by a Mc Donald’s.
It is no use regretting the
lost opportunity. To get the ‘right’ view I would have needed a telephoto lens,
not to avoid confronting the couple, but to change the perspective so that the
coal staithes loomed in the background. You have probably seen this compressed
perspective effect in numerous National Geographic features. Huge moon
setting behind the Eiffel Tower. Huge moon setting behind the Taj Mahal. Huge moon
setting behind an oil derrick in the Gulf of Mexico. Huge moon setting behind a
launch-gantry at Cape Kennedy. You get the idea.
If I had taken the photograph
with a telephoto lens, what would the picture have looked like? I imagine that
the scene would have been a medium close-up of the couple and the coal-dust encrusted
brickwork of the staithes would have largely filled the background. I think
that a gust of wind blew the bride’s veil up into the air for a moment, its pristine
cleanliness contrasting with the century of grime behind her. Perhaps they
would have been looking at each other. Perhaps one of them would have looked at
something outside the frame as if contemplating the future. The image could
have been read that way, even though he or she might just as easily have been watching
a relative cross the road. Some of the most iconic photographs are successful because
they invite us to read things into them that are not really there. To get a
range of glances and expressions I would have needed a Nikon motor-drive camera
to take multiple frames in a few seconds. In those days I didn’t even know such
a thing existed. It would have cost more than my motorcycle.
The image could have been a
minor classic, or not. To believe that such a picture could say anything
meaningful about the lives of the people in is to believe in a tradition of
documentary photography that seeks to explain life from within 24mm x 36mm
frames and instances of 125th of a second. We partly live our lives
through metaphors and the young couple were starting their new lives by literally
walking away from their industrial background. The documentary tradition of
photography excuses its temporary intrusion in the subject’s time and space by
a faintly unctuous appeal to our sense of pathos. Out of the millions of
photographs that have been taken a few have come to symbolise things that we
care about, even if the people depicted in them are treated as cyphers. We have
become used to the industrialisation of our perception but to take a ‘meaningful’
photograph, within the ethos of documentary photography, is rather like
wandering round a field of randomly scattered words until a sentence can be
read in a line that is seen from one position. We might feel pride in having
the wit and perseverance to find that ideal place, but the ‘heroism of vision’
is probably just vanity.
