Words and photo: Mark Wrigley
It was the end of the Sixties. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin had landed on the moon, Concorde had made its maiden flight, Britain was switching to North Sea gas, the Beatles had split and Ken Loach’s film ‘Kes’ had just been released. In Sheffield, the ‘hole in the road’ was 3 years old and Arundel Gate was a busy dual carriageway designed to move traffic through the city quickly while pedestrians used underpasses.
I was in the Sixth Form at a school not too dissimilar to Billy Casper’s and happy to have passed enough ‘O’ levels to continue my education. I had been told that my ‘O’ level success was “by the skin of your teeth”, which I think was meant as a reprimand. I took it to mean that I’d got the balance between school work and hobbies exactly right. In mid-century modernist Britain, my attention was on home electronics, recording the Apollo space programme on reel-to-reel audio, 8mm cine film and 35mm photography. I was the kid who always had his Zenith B camera with him at school and even used it to catch up by photographing chemistry notes that I’d missed due to illness.
One Saturday afternoon I decided to experiment with the specialist, high contrast film that I’d bought for copying the chemistry notes. So I tried it out in the camera on a trip to town (Sheffield). I wandered from Chapel Walk to the Hole in the Road, Fargate, Arundel Gate and finally to King Street, looking all the time for good shots, quite unaware of the significance of the design icons that I was photographing. When I reached the gas show rooms I was confronted by a mermaid reclining in a boat in the showroom window. This was a real, live, professional model, dressed as a mermaid, promoting gas fires for Britain’s new ‘clean’ North Sea gas. As a somewhat introverted 17 year old, it took some courage to walk up and get the shot. But I did it, and the resulting photograph also shows me reflected in the window, camera in hand.
I managed to capture one of the famous David Mellor yellow bins and an example of the new Calvert and Kinner road signs. But real life modernism is not quite like a Habitat catalogue. Few have a real living room that looks like the catalogue; most of us add new design pieces to our existing furniture. And so it was with Sheffield, where modern design sat alongside existing buildings, mostly those that had survived the blitz.
When I got to the darkroom, I found that my experiment with high contrast film had failed. I had loaded the 35mm film into a cassette with no problems or fogging but when I came to develop it, the results were too difficult to print. The exposure was correct but the contrast was very high. Darkroom printing, even on low contrast paper, gave poor results. I filed the negatives away and was slightly relieved that the embarrassing shot of the mermaid would not see light of day.
Fast forward more than 50 years to the first Covid lockdown. To pass the time I had been experimenting with digitising 35mm film using a digital camera, Adobe Lightroom and a ‘plug in’ for reversing negative images. I was getting some very good results from the negatives in my archive. In a file of old black and white negatives from my school days, I found the almost forgotten images of my trip to town. The combination of RAW image files and sophisticated editing software enabled me to tease out good quality images from the high contrast negatives. Half a century after the event, I could see the images from my experimental trip to town.
As for me, some 50 years later? The ‘skin of the teeth’ strategy has paid off. I’ve had a career in digital mobile communications and a lifelong passion for photography. I did once meet Buzz Aldrin, although I never flew in Concorde. And I often wonder what happened to the mermaid.
Find Mark Wrigley and the rest of his Sheffield photos from 1969 on:
