In Black and White
The first time I ever used black and white film was way back in 1980 when I was still a student at the University of Sussex. Just a little way east of Brighton near the small village of Falmer, this was one of the so-called plateglass universities, built in the 1960s and featuring, as the name implies, a lot of large windows.
This was my third and final year and I had no clue whatsover what I was going to do with the rest of my life. Photography then, as it is now, was a hobby. Whatever living I was going to make was going to be by some other means.
Nonetheless, the fact that I chose black and white film spoke to a certain sense of wanting to get a particular look. I don’t even remember the camera, maybe a Pentax and a 50mm lens of some type, but it did the job.
As you can see, I went out with the camera on a couple of variably wet and cloudy days. Wet and cloudy days were common at that time. I wanted to get sense of the architecture. I’ve no idea if it is the same today as I haven’t been back to the university for decades but you have to admit it does have a look to it.
The monochrome also suited my mood of the time well. I had no sense of a future, and it was soon to take some very unexpected turns but these were not apparent at the time.
I was spending a lot of time in the library. Finals were getting closer and I wanted to do well.
I photocopied a lot of scientific papers. I did not read many of them. I kind of felt that simply photocopying was good enough.
Somehow, despite this, I must have taken something in for I did well enough in the end. But I never developed the taste for scientific papers despite a lifetime in the field. The reality is they are pretty much unreadable.
I spent a lot of time drinking and listening to music. As many students do. I also met the woman who was to become my first wife and to change my life in dramatic ways.
All gone now. Gone a very long time. It’s something of a miracle that I have these pictures. I found the negatives on a recent trip back to England. My mother had carried them with her through several changes of address. I had long thought they were lost. Will today’s digital images do so well? Somehow I doubt it.
These days I take a lot of black and white film photographs. I took it up again in 2014 — having not used it since the time these pictures were taken. I’m better at it from a technical point of view but that, as I’ve begun to fully realise, is irrelevant. What matters is the emotion and the power of the image to evoke a sense of time and place. These have it in buckets. I’ll have a hard time matching them. But, in ways that I’m only half aware of, I’m probably doing so right now.
We’ll see.
