An Introduction to Brutalism in Colour in four photographs
A brief introduction to my longest running personal project in four images taken over the past 33 years that have shaped my methods and style.
The first image was taken when I was fourteen, in Ilkley, on a family trip to visit friends. My dad had recently shown me how to use the ‘B’ setting on my basic SLR and I was keen to try it out . There’s nothing particularly special about this night time shot, but it was the first one I ever took, and it opened my eyes to the possibilities of how a long exposures could be used to show things in a different light.
Years later when I was working in London as a black and white printer, I was always experimenting with different films and developers. I wanted a way to show brutalist architecture in a slightly different way. This image was shot using infra red film, early in the morning. I liked the softer shadows, brought about by the diffused light and long exposure, coupled with the bright reflections of the sky that the infra red film revealed. I shot a small series and submitted them to the ‘end frame’ feature that the British Journal of Photography ran on a weekly basis back then. I was disappointed when I didn’t hear anything back, only to be delighted a couple of months later when I found out that they had saved it for an ‘Architecture Special’ edition.
Sadly, black and white printing was in decline when I started at the lab and while I managed to get several good years out of it, eventually I bowed to the inevitable and moved to colour printing. The time was right for me and I found myself enjoying it far more than I thought I would, this in turn, fed into my personal work and I began to photograph brutalist buildings in central London on my way home in the evening. This one was by far the most successful, but a planned series fell flat after I was unable to replicate the results with enough other buildings.
In 2017 brutal_architecture organised a ‘Welbeck Wake’ and as it was a building I loved, I went along. It was a thoroughly entertaining evening and while on my way home I looked through the pictures I’d taken with my Sony mirrorless camera, trying to decide which to post to Instagram. Aware that there would be many other images posted from the evening I was trying to think of a way to make mine stand out. One of the techniques I’d learned at the lab was sometimes to push the image too far in order to understand it better, in that same spirit I pushed the saturation level to 100% and loved the result. Welbeck was the perfect building to try this technique, as it had such a wide range of lighting striking it, which when coupled with its many faceted facade, brought out its structure. The following week I travelled around central London photographing another five buildings to see if I could get similar results. I could, and so this project was born.
