The Early Days
Photography of the past
Fine Art Photographs of Leeds
This is on its face, a look at a vanished world. The men are wearing tall hats and dark colours and many layers. That is what you, as a reader many years on, likely believe. A book of dubious historical value because its scope is strangely modest. It shows quite a few but not an exhaustive number of views of an English city and its surrounds. There may be nothing more to it than that.
But first, one or two things leap to mind. One is that new technologies – photographs being just one – were not sooner invented than tried out. Once or twice I have spoken to someone of early photography, and they assumed that it was a closet capacity barely ever seen by the public, hidden away by those rich enough to photograph and develop. But not a bit of it. There were many competing process of image capture and development. But they were made to compete out there, before the public.
No wonder so many of us have photographs of our comparatively poor distant relatives. They could only afford one, but once it was no longer a novelty, it became an obligation.
Second, we might now think of Leeds largely through prisms of other things: who lives there now and where in the world they hail from, for instance. Or the university, to which I’m sure a few of your friends, if you grew up vaguely like me and vaguely in the part of the world I grew up in, attended. If only for a time.
But no, the tour guide might say, calling to your through the centuries. No, there is more to Leeds than that. It was not, perhaps, a place of the greatest antiquity. There are no great assemblies of Canterburian or Cantabrigian age and vintage. But there are things that even a century ago were considered notably old and worth photographing, propagation to show a place’s seasoning. The Victorians invented tradition; and the early Edwardians cherished nothing more than supposed or real links to the past.
And the history was also one of great growth and change. A place which was not completely made but was made greater by industrialisation, by coal and iron. This was a place of power as well as a place of work.
They made things, in the past.
And architecture which many would now think of as either impossibly fine or terribly pompous was made and produced here the use of municipal power. English councils used to matter and they used to have authority. Hence the buildings for them, which used – once upon a time – to be of a scale and of a beauteous style that betrayed that power and influence.
Think, too, of the newish or late Victorian medical buildings: the hospital and the dispensary. Back when it was possible and legal to build. And the corn exchange and the institute of science. The college (in fact, more than one), the ancient grammar school. Places where learning, or what passed for it, held their sway.
No Edwardian depiction of a city’s goodly places could omit the church, either figuratively or literally in the form of its many buildings. And this book has stained glass – not in fine definition – and high ceilings in plenty. Many different churches, for parishes and for nonconforming communities. All across the city and its surrounds.
Once upon a time, at my old university, a question was set to undergraduates who were reading history. It read, ‘what do pictures want?’ At the time, we all grumbled about this, asked each other what it could possibly mean. But these days, it’s clear what media wants from us. The English once venerated and knelt before their shining altars – that is what books like this want us to think. The ruined Kirkstall Abbey, meanwhile, tells us too that long ago, other traditions reigned here, but they are gone, their power over men’s hearts disappearing one morning, never to return.
God, meanwhile, remains an Englishman – no matter the denomination.
There is nature in a book like this; and don’t forget it. But it is nature in harmony with man, or subjugated by him. This is man as good steward, as lands agent on a great estate. There are parks with grass fiercely shorn. There are canals cut by man and once hauling so much in goods and minerals they were as rich as a new silk road. There was much, once upon a time, to admire.
Books like these were once common. Tourist tat or souvenirs. A bit of local pride. They might be common once more. They show us an old society many of whose leaders, whose intelligentsia and, most surprising of all, whose artists truly cared for their country. Whose society believed in itself, who thought the thing worth preserving and protecting into the future. What a difference a hundred years makes.