Not Quite Light will be part of this year’s Sale Arts Trail, which takes place across the weekend of 10th/11th and 12th of July 2015. The opening night on the 10th of July is open to all and entry is free.
7 pieces of work will be displayed in Coasters Cafe on Northenden Road and a larger print will be featured in the Waterside Arts Centre as part of the group exhibition.
There will also be a dawn walk through Sale with the photographer, Simon Buckley, on the morning of Sunday 12th July ( meet at the canalside outside the Waterside at 3.15am -free) and a talk at Coasters cafe about Not Quite Light at 4pm on the same day, also free.
For more details visit the Sale Arts Trail website or email notquitelight@gmail.com
There’s a sense of growing affection for Ancoats. No longer do people scurry from doorway to cab, fearful of being mugged, or “taxed” as I recently heard a Glaswegian refer to it. Ancoats is maybe the best of Manchester’s efforts to reinvent itself. The area used to pulse with endeavour, power and anger but now, whilst it still gives sanctuary to its ghosts, it increasingly neutralises their presence.
Soon the streets around the dark brick buildings, glowing blood red in the familiar rain, will be no more threatening than a heritage park. Restaurants and cafes will open, apartments will prick the aspirational thumbs of young Mancs and the sinister spectre of industrial poverty will have been washed forever from the pavements. I like that the developers have decided to retain the old mills and warehouses. A city needs its heart kept alive and, on this wet morning, the spirit of Manchester glistened across the dark shadows.
It rains a lot in Manchester, or so we have become programmed to believe. Water follows our Mancunian lives each and every year, washing down the streets and buildings. But not the cars it seems. I’d found the great American car wash by accident, and have never yet seen it in any other state than behind a barred gate and utterly shut.
I’d love to know what, in particular, makes it an American car wash. Is there some great American dream incorporated into the experience? Away down the street several cars arrived, and people sat in them for as long as they could, delaying the start of their work in the small brick office next to them. Whatever job it was they had, I suspect it wasn’t in their thinking at infant school.
I’ve always felt that the soul of Not Quite Light lies in the streets around Angel Meadows. I keep being drawn back there, fascinated by the history of that small patch of ground that contains the bodies of 40,000 Mancunian ancestors, and that also inspired the work of Engels and Marx. There are buildings and towns that trade on ghosts and hauntings but never have I felt fearful of being so close to the bones of folk that suffered untimely and miserable deaths.
Maybe they lie in peace, these victims of overwork and poverty, happy that the current workers crammed into the new flats nearby have light and warmth before their exertions begin. Maybe they’re just dead, and no spirit endures. Cars pull into the nearby car park, and the occupants head quickly away into the city centre, towards the bloated shape of the new Co-op building and leaving me to stare at a pure, single light and a Give Way sign.
SEE MANCHESTER AT DAWN WITHOUT HAVING TO GET UP…
£150.00 + p&p
This is a special limited edition print from the Not Quite Light project and is available for sale. Only 50 prints will be produced from each image. Each print will be signed, numbered and presented with documentation guaranteeing the limited edition. Text from the blog will also accompany the image. The work is printed on archive Giclee paper at 20×16 inches, and I work with a local printer to ensure high standards of print quality.
About a week ago, during one of my evening walks with my flatmate, a young woman, probably in her mid-twenties, approached us just near Redbank. She was well dressed in a knee length skirt, low heeled boots and a coat. She spoke with an Australian accent.
“Good evening gents, sorry to bother you but I’m lost” she said. “I’m supposed to be meeting a male friend under an arch near here, we’re off to take some photographs together”.
She produced an iPad from her handbag. “Can you show me where I am?”
I didn’t have my glasses, and had to tell her I couldn’t see the map. There was an awkward silence and the tablet glowed blue like a beacon amongst the darkened red brick architecture around us.
My flatmate spoke up. “It’s not really safe to be wandering around here. It’s not so bad now, but there used to be kerb crawling and the like. Why don’t you phone him?”
“I don’t have his number. Also my phone is dead, I can only email him.”
We decided to direct her to the nearby Marble Arch pub, so she could send a message and wait safely.
After she’d gone we both agreed that there was something not quite right about what we’d encountered. She had no cameras, no tripod and why had her friend simply not met her at the nearby Metrolink station, where she’d arrived at?
I thought of her whilst photographing under the bridge in Redbank and hoped everything had worked out.
SEE MANCHESTER AT DAWN WITHOUT HAVING TO GET UP…
£150.00 + p&p
This is a special limited edition print from the Not Quite Light project and is available for sale. Only 50 prints will be produced from each image. Each print will be signed, numbered and presented with documentation guaranteeing the limited edition. Text from the blog will also accompany the image. The work is printed on archive Giclee paper at 20×16 inches, and I work with a local printer to ensure high standards of print quality.
NEW GEORGE STREET, SMITHFIELD SQUARE, MANCHESTER. 7.32AM
Despite 2 chain hotels and a new apartment block surrounding Smithfield Square, the only colour was from the light of the Spar. The architects of the flats have tried to make an effort with some blocks of yellow, but somehow it feels like they’ve used the last bits of Lego left in the bag.
I’m never quite sure why so much of the new architecture in Manchester is grey, and there seems to be a phobia towards creating green spaces. Some businesses have put in spikes to stop homeless people sleeping outside them and, in Manchester, I sometimes wonder if the same principle is applied to workers by not putting in seats, so that they can’t rest and compromise the energy and economic ambition of the city.
I wasn’t sure if this lad, searching through his wallet, was on his way home or going to work. Behind him is the final part of a £120m development. The apartments have been sold to an investment company.
SEE MANCHESTER AT DAWN WITHOUT HAVING TO GET UP…
£150.00 + p&p
This is a special limited edition print from the Not Quite Light project and is available for sale. Only 50 prints will be produced from each image. Each print will be signed, numbered and presented with documentation guaranteeing the limited edition. Text from the blog will also accompany the image. The work is printed on archive Giclee paper at 20×16 inches, and I work with a local printer to ensure high standards of print quality.
Manchester is unfairly famed for its rain. If it’s raining in Manchester, then somewhere else along the west of Britain is also getting it, and I’d rather this new, soft water than drought and lime. It’s not easy to photograph in though. The camera drips miserably and the lens needs constant attention.
This morning my hood was up and my chilled hands were thrust deep into dampened pockets. A bin lorry, or waste re-cycling vehicle, as it’s now known, pulled up beside me and the driver pushed his head through the open side window. Orange, spinning lights swept across our faces.
“What you taking photos of mate?”
” Just the area..”
“Shit isn’t it?”
“It has its own beauty” I replied.
“Well, at least you’ve got a number on your coat, mate” he said, and drove off.
I looked down to see a small, white sticker proclaiming “The Roaring Twenties” on my chest, acquired from a weekend visit to a stately home. And then, round the corner, I found a Jaguar in a cage.
SEE MANCHESTER AT DAWN WITHOUT HAVING TO GET UP…
£150.00 + p&p
This is a special limited edition print from the Not Quite Light project and is available for sale. Only 50 prints will be produced from each image. Each print will be signed, numbered and presented with documentation guaranteeing the limited edition. Text from the blog will also accompany the image. The work is printed on archive Giclee paper at 20×16 inches, and I work with a local printer to ensure high standards of print quality.
I only have around 35 minutes to work in each morning, before the light lifts and the street lights go off. People who are on their way to work in this transient half light have tense faces. They resist eye contact, shoulders are hunched, there are no smiles. There’s a sense of isolation.
Great Ancoats Street and Swan Street sometimes feel to me as if they are a tarmac moat, between the city centre and the network of untidy streets at the bottom of the Oldham and Rochdale Roads, that show little sign of the of the supposed economic and cultural boom of the Northern Quarter and the area around Victoria Station.
The strip lights in the CIS tower are always on it seems, whilst the beer garden of The Angel, almost 200 years old, must wait until the summer sun returns.
SEE MANCHESTER AT DAWN WITHOUT HAVING TO GET UP…
£150.00 + p&p
This is a special limited edition print from the Not Quite Light project and is available for sale. Only 50 prints will be produced from each image. Each print will be signed, numbered and presented with documentation guaranteeing the limited edition. Text from the blog will also accompany the image. The work is printed on archive Giclee paper at 20×16 inches, and I work with a local printer to ensure high standards of print quality.
I work in a simple fashion. Just a digital camera, one short zoom and a tripod. I shoot more with a Colt 45, face to face, than as a sniper with all his telescopic sites, and so it’s easy to set up once I notice something.
The morning was cold, not much love in the sky. I could tell that it promised nothing more than a solid grey.This car had pulled up opposite a waiting taxi, and was blocking the road. The driver looked nervous and unsure as to what to do. The taxi left and she remained waiting. The modern flats somehow reminded me of an eggbox turned on its side. I found out later that Ludgate Street is approximately 17.39 miles from the sea. I’ve no idea why someone would need to know that. I doubt that the woman in the car was going to Blackpool for the day.
New residents are packed into these new build apartments, which seem cramped. At the bottom of Ludgate Street lies Angel Meadow, where once slums stood and Marx and Engels went to work in their forensic examination of the poor, eventually arriving at what has been termed “Scientific Socialism.” Beneath what is now a park, where current residents walk their dogs, lie the remains of their Manchester ancestors, in their thousands.
SEE MANCHESTER AT DAWN WITHOUT HAVING TO GET UP…
£150.00 + p&p
This is a special limited edition print from the Not Quite Light project and is available for sale. Only 50 prints will be produced from each image. Each print will be signed, numbered and presented with documentation guaranteeing the limited edition. Text from the blog will also accompany the image. The work is printed on archive Giclee paper at 20×16 inches, and I work with a local printer to ensure high standards of print quality.
NOT QUITE LIGHT 