How a New York photographer’s forgotten photos are reviving memories
In his long career as a photographer, New Yorker Graham Macindoe is up there with the best in the business.
He has exhibited work at major art galleries and captured portraits for a formidable roster of celebrities and well-known faces, including Anthony Bordain, The White Stripes and Michael Jackson.
Wind the spool back 35 years, however, and he was just a young man from Broxburn studying painting at Edinburgh College of Art with a bit of a knack for street photography – but nothing serious.
Though the industry would later define him, Mr Macindoe said it had never occurred to him to pursue a career in photography at that point in his life.
“I hadn’t thought of myself as a photographer,” he said. “I was just someone with a camera who took pictures.”
For around two years in the mid 1980s, Mr Macindoe developed a passion for documenting street life around Edinburgh, creating intimate portraits of ordinary people at work, rest and play, including in the city’s dilapidated schemes, where few photographers bothered to venture.
The candid Edinburgh snaps would lead Mr Macindoe away from painting and on the road towards a lucrative career as a photographer in America.
Now the 57-year-old photography professor has taken a dust cloth to his forgotten archives and begun to post them in batches to the Lost Edinburgh Facebook group where they have been received with great enthusiasm.
He said: “I’d sort of forgotten about all these pictures; I’d put them all away.
“I was just passionate about taking pictures. Nobody knew at that point there would be the internet and scanners and the ability to share on multiple types of platforms for all sorts of people to comment and engage with.”
A growing number of group members have recognised late family members and lost school friends in the photos. One woman even identified her late father, blowtorch in hand, working on the foundations of St Leonard’s police station in 1985.