a day in scarborough 1977 | pablo luis gonzález

explorations

These images shot around Scarborough and Whitby Bay in the late 70s. I had an interest in photography since I was a child. During the 60s I was using an old twin lens reflex Kodak that my father had brought from America a decade earlier. I opened the back of the camera when I was shooting my first film in the middle of a field, the warmth of the summer sun caressing my entrails, as I wanted to see how the image looked like in the film before processing. That was my first lesson in photography. The camera used 126 film, I think. A friend of my mother had a photographic shop round the corner of my mother's bookshop. She developed my early films, giving me impromptu photography lessons.

My initial photographs in Yorkshire were taken to support the course in Architecture I was reading, but I quickly extended my coverage to use the camera as a tool for interaction with a new reality, and for the sheer delight of photography. Former merchant sailors who could name all the red district bars in Valparaíso were not in short supply in Hull.

I studies with awe the works of photographers who I admired: Cartier-Bresson, Robert Frank, Gary Winogrand, Lee Friedlander, Lazlo Moholy-Nagy, Wegee, Eve Arnold, Josef Koudelka, João Sebastião, Bill Brandt, Mary Ellen Mark, and others. What attracted me to street photography was the immediacy of the shooting, that brief moment when oneself, the reality flowing outside my being, and the camera between the hands became one single entity. That instant for every single photograph still dwells in my memory.

Most of the photographs were shot in Kodak Tri-X film rated at 400 ASA and Ilford HP5 film rated at 400 and 800 ASA, developed in a two bath process with Kodak Microdol-X and Agfa Rodinal developers (Microdol, being a soft developer, produced a fine grained image which was sharpened by briefly cooking the film in Rodinal at the end of the developing process). My black and white photographs are currently printed on Agfa Classic variable contrast fibre based paper, developed in Agfa Neutol developer at 3 minutes at 20° C. Agfa Neutol is a very active developer, which gets the blacks out of the paper as no other developer that I have tried does. The cameras used were a Pentax Spotmatic and a Leica CL.

I regard these photographs as a discreet collection of objects which may, or may not, have a definitive connection with the reality that they are supposed to depict. The possibility of such connections is circumstantial and ultimately irrelevant to the apprehension of the reality of this particular set of images.

Pablo Luis González / Hull 1999-2001

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