PAST IN FOCUS:

Collection of photographs which vividly capture life in Yorkshire at a time of social upheaval.

HE cover photograph of John Bulmer’s book is an unmistakeable visual signpost to “The North”.

Two mill girls pictured in Elland, in 1965, hair-rollers in, head scarves on and eating chips. The “look” less a swinging 60s fashion statement , more a safety consideration in keeping their hair out of the machinery they worked on. One girl is glancing away from the camera with an embarrassed, self conscious smile, while the other looks directly at the lens. We’ll never know what she was thinking, but it was probably “What are you looking at?”

The North summed up by a single frame of 35mm colour film.

The pictures, taken on a series of visits in the 1960s and 70s, reflect the emergence of a new age of colour documentary photography. The world of Bill Brandt’s dark satanic, and most definitely black and white, mills from three decades earlier is still there, but John Bulmer’s use of colour gave a new perspective on how we viewed the world.

Photographs of pit-ponies, cobbled streets and women hanging out washing are well-used totemic images when any depiction of the North is called for. Those pictures are here but there is much more.

The use of colour and John Bulmer’s eye give the images an unselfconscious honesty. With the exception of some shop front displays, the colours don’t have a Hollywood vibrancy. Instead it’s a variety of pastel browns, greens and oranges, the same palette as family photographs and slides, perhaps taken on an eponymous Kodak Brownie. It’s that which helps create a sense of domestic familiarity which puts the viewer next to Bulmer as he presses the shutter.

The Sunday Times pioneered the use of colour in its magazine and gave the photographer an added sense of worth, following in the great traditions of visual essays as pioneered by publications such as Picture Post and Life magazines.

As the Sixties progressed, institutions and conventions were being re-invented as reflected in the rise of youth culture, music, fashion and politics. It is the physical

LIFE OF GRIME: Miners at Dawdon Colliery, Durham in 1965. John Bulmer documented life in the North of England in the 1960s and 70s as well as travelling the world as a newspaper photographer.