The art of backlighting
Discover Denis Thorpe’s unique documentary work
In the early hours of 26 September 1950, an underground fire broke out within the Creswell Colliery in Derbyshire, trapping dozens of miners working below. As the day wore on and word spread about the accident, families and friends gathered for news. Standing in the crowd was an 18-year-old photographer from the local weekly newspaper. His name was Denis Thorpe. Working with a Contax rangefinder camera borrowed from his boss, Denis soon became aware that he was witnessing the aftermath of a mining disaster. ‘I just quietly wandered around and photographed what I could see,’ he recalls. ‘I don’t remember seeing any other photographers, but because I was a young man and had this little camera, I think people didn’t take any notice of me. Then, I realised what an enormous thing it was. You didn’t know at that time how many people had been killed and then you saw what was happening around you – that was such a moving thing.’ One of Denis’s photographs from that day shows an official reading out a list of names to the sombre crowd – in all, the disaster claimed 80 lives.
Nearly 70 years later, Denis still wonders at the enormity of the day and its significance to his own life, brought up in a mining community, all too aware of the dangers faced daily by his own family members. ‘I don’t know how I did it – to be able to be there as a young man to see that and photograph it,’ he reflects, ‘ but it was important to me then because a lot of my family were in mining, so I knew about miners and I suppose I could identify with a lot of things that were going on.’ Surprisingly, none of the photographs Denis took that day were published in his paper, the
Mansfield Reporter, and it is only now with the release of his new book, A View from the North, that they have finally been published.
Finding inspiration
The book is a major retrospective of Denis’s life in photography, from his first photos of family life while growing up in Mansfield, to his celebrated press photography working from the Manchester offices of the Daily Mail followed by The Guardian, for which he worked for 23 years. Now 86, Denis and his former Guardian colleague, the late Don McPhee, are recognised as two of the finest recorders of working life in England’s North during the second half of the 20th century. But as a teenager, Denis had no ambitions to be a press photographer. He wanted to be a reporter. ‘I obviously made some impression on the editor of the paper,’ he recalls. ‘He couldn’t take
me on as a trainee reporter, but said the photographer needed an assistant.’ So, aged 16, Denis began his apprenticeship under Arthur George, chief photographer of the Mansfield Reporter. ‘I don’t think I’d ever seen a press photographer; I really didn’t know what they did,’ he says. ‘He used to take me out with him on assignments. He was a good teacher and I would just observe what he did. All he had was one of these Contax cameras. He was very interested in 35mm photography and none of the press photographers did that.’
Denis also made trips to the local library to study the technicalities of cameras, film development and exposure. ‘ There were no training schemes then, and no real books on photography,’ he says, ‘ but I did discover Bill Brandt and I thought that was wonderful. Then I found the Art section and looked through lots of art books and I got interested in that.’ The French Impressionists, in particular the paintings of Edgar Degas, captured his imagination and led to a picture that he now regards as one of his first successes. He remembers: ‘I’d seen the Degas pictures of women ironing and they reminded me so much of my mother standing there ironing with a flat iron, and then that beautiful light coming in; that was one of my first really successful experiments. I thought, I can make a beautiful picture like that with this small camera. Amazing.’
Master of backlighting
In this early photograph, Denis’s mother is backlit by the sun streaming through the arch window above the front door as she presses down on the heavy iron, absorbed in her work. Backlighting has remained a hallmark of much of his work since, most notably in two of his most reproduced prints: a steam-hauled train steaming across the Ribblehead Viaduct in 1986, and the silhouetted figures of a mother pushing her infant in a pram across a wet Salford Street, her older child following behind. By this time, Denis was shooting with a Nikon F2 and two Leica
‘Colour can be very distracting and take you away from the rhythm of the picture and the structure and the geometry’
rangefinders, the M2 and M3, usually loaded with Ilford FP4, his favourite film. ‘I would always use prime lenses so I would use a 50mm on the M3 because the viewfinder was exactly 50mm, and on the M2 I’d use the 35mm f/1.4,’ he says. ‘ Those were my two super workhorses. Then I’d use a wideangle for the Nikon and a 200mm on another Nikon, and that’s it. So, you might have seen me walking around with three cameras sometimes, but that’s what people did – I don’t think I had a zoom until the 1990s.’
With such a long inventory of pictures to draw from, A View from the North is filled with photographic gems that enhance his reputation as a true master of the black & white exposure – finding the light in scenes and situations that might have seemed impossible in an era when pushing film beyond ISO 400 was considered an educated guess. One of his most powerful portraits shows a miner working in the grim darkness of a subterranean coal face, lit only by the head lamps of his fellow workers. For this photo Denis returned to Creswell, this time descending into the pit that had consumed the previous generation of miners. ‘I had the chance to go 20-odd years later to the coal face at Creswell Colliery. That was an emotional visit for me, to actually go there and see that,’ he recalls. ‘It shows exactly how people had to work in a three-foot seam of coal – damned hard work.’
The miners’ strike
Our conversation leads inevitably to the miners’ strike of 1984-85, which ravaged dozens of mining villages faced with pit closures across the north of England, South Wales and Scotland. As Denis was a son of the mining community, what sort of feelings and thoughts went through his mind while covering this story? There is a long pause followed by a sigh before he answers: ‘What sort of feelings? Goodness. It was a difficult one, really. There were a lot of people who felt they should have had a better say in things. Some of the Nottinghamshire miners weren’t in agreement, but I think most of the miners felt “this is my livelihood and it’s just going to be taken away from me”. That’s what my family did; that was their livelihood. I remember one of my uncles; he was at Blidworth Colliery, and the family was there. I used to go and stay with them in the pit village and we would have lunch at the miners’ welfare, so I was quite close to it. I suppose I would feel quite sympathetic and think that these people are being robbed of their lives, really. I mean, what are they going to do and what did they do? People like Mrs Thatcher never thought about anything like that, did they?’
Denis continued to photograph miners and their communities after the strike, including the book cover
image from 1989 of a group of laughing miners leaving work after their shift at Yorkshire’s Thurcroft Colliery. ‘I think the joke was on me but I don’t know what it was. They’d come straight out of the pit from their shift to the bath house and one of them cracked up and all the other ones got the same joke and they were hysterical by the time they got to me,’ he says. ‘ There’s a wonderful rhythm about the whole thing. I don’t mind whatever joke it was because it made a great picture.’
Black & white advantage
Another of his favourites was also taken in 1989 and features a group of primary school children linking together in a line in a playground, their shadows sharply defined by a low morning sun. Denis was on assignment in Bury with a reporter and planning the day with the head teacher in her office when he looked out of the window and saw this scene. ‘For me it has the beautiful geometry one constantly strives for, but there is also an extra bonus with the running child on the top of the picture seemingly floating above her shadow. A magical moment. You could never choreograph such a satisfying arrangement. Of course, it was the lead photograph in The Guardian’s education section the next day.’
This picture is also a testament to Denis’s versatility, equally at ease with the soft feature as the hard news, while also remaining highly responsive to the spontaneous alignment of light, movement and position that is the identifying characteristic of the street photographers who inspired him, namely Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Doisneau. Like them, Denis also prefers black & white and considers himself fortunate to have worked in the era before colour became part of the diet of daily newspapers. ‘I’ve spent most of my career in black & white,’ he says, ‘mostly because that’s what newspapers wanted. Colour can be very distracting and take you away from the rhythm of the picture and the structure and the geometry; it’s a completely different field. When you introduce colour it’s something else, and I could never cope with it. So, I’m glad that black & white was the standard for journalism.’
New-found love
Denis continues to take pictures, ‘mostly family, landscapes and things like that’, but a new-found love involves photographing surfers off the North Wales coast. ‘It’s absolutely beautiful with a long lens to watch some of the surfers,’ he says. ‘Poetry, isn’t it? When there were gales and hurricanes, we had some tremendous seas and I went to the North Wales coast and I photographed surfing up there. A bit of action keeps me on my toes!’
He has also embraced the digital era and managed to find a camera that reflects his enduring love for the rangefinder. ‘I have a camera which is near enough to the rangefinders I’ve used and that’s the Fujifilm X-Pro2,’ he enthuses. ‘It’s beautiful and the lenses are fantastic, so I’ve got some lenses for that and that’s the camera I have with me now.’ He then chuckles to himself: ‘So really, it’s me going back to my beginnings again, using this camera that’s exactly like a rangefinder!’ Something tells me that Arthur George, his old mentor, is looking down, vigorously nodding in approval.