Category Archives: Photographs

Cabbie

Photographs

Hullo, matey.


London. August, 1972.

It takes three years to learn the 25,000 streets which constitute London and the aspiring licensed cab driver will spend that time on a bicycle or scooter learning all of them, when not studying maps at home. Scientists say it’s the most prodigious feat of memory known to man. Indeed, studies by my alma mater, University College, London, have found that during this period the hippocampus, the memory part of the brain, grows substantially in size, presumably to accommodate this fount of knowledge.

Quite how London’s traditional cabs survive in an age of Google Maps beats me but, you know, there will always be an England. This happy member of that elite group – back in the day the cabs were black and drivers were white – was only too happy to say ‘Hullo’.

Leica M3, 50mm Elmar, TriX.

Note for the pedantic: The alphabetic suffix on UK license plates started with the letter ‘A’ in 1965, one letter a year, so you would think that the ‘J’ in the license plate connotes 1974. But this was actually snapped in 1972. Why the difference? Taxi cab plates do not adopt the usual passenger car system!

The North End Road

Photographs

Fruit and veg.

England is certainly not the agricultural powerhouse that is France and the United States, but when I was a lad growing up in London they grew fine fruit and veg and, yes, exported a lot of that. Now exports are zero in the wake of the greatest act of economic suicide – Brexit – since George III lost America. Oh! well. The produce was fresh and chemical free, back then.

These were snapped in the fall of 1971 along the North End Road which not only featured produce vendors but also the occasional spiv unloading clothing which had fallen off the back of the truck, one wary eye out for the cops.








Leica M3, 35mm and 90mm Elmar lenses, TriX.

Amazingly, the market exists to this day.

I went down to the demonstration

Photographs

August, 1971.


Mick Jagger and Keith Richards.

Leicester Square, London, in my youth was the place to demonstrate, make merry and vent your frustrations at The Man.

Snapped on my then newly acquired Leica M3, 50mm and 90mm Elmar lenses, TriX film, scanned on a Nikon D800. I was 19 years old:










You can read about the Soledad Brothers here.

Terence Cuneo

Book reviews, Paintings

Steam train painting master.

Ask me which photography book I would choose if I could only have one and the answer has been unchanged for decades. It’s O. Winston Link’s (1914-2001) Steam, Steel and Stars. A masterpiece of nostalgia, composition and technique, it’s so good that I own two copies, the lighter paperback joining me on my travels:


Everyone should have two.

But a photographer can only go with what is there. Yes, he can change the lighting and composition but he does not have the creative freedom afforded a painter whose limits are those of his imagination. And if you want something of the same caliber as Link’s photographs on a canvas the only choice is the work of Terence Cuneo (1907-96).

High drama is a given in his moving train canvases:


High drama.

Yet the more mundane images are no less powerful and nostalgic:


The signalman.

Cuneo would generally make pen and ink sketches first and completed many commissions for British Railways. In this example, where the cab is being lowered onto the wheels and chassis, he arrived too late. Because he was well known by the operators it was a moment’s work for them to raise the cab so he could complete his sketch:


Preliminary sketch.

And then, Boom!, an absolute masterpiece:


An Engine is Wheeled.

Imagine an advertising campaign today with this ‘backroom’ approach? Pictures of Chinese slave labor assembling iPhones? I don’t think so.

And if you desire Impressionist genius, Cuneo is happy to oblige, as in this image on the Orient Express:


Impressionism on the Orient Express.

These images are from a splendid book titled ‘Terence Cuneo: Railway Painter of the Century‘. It’s long out of print but available from used sellers and the quality of the printing on very thick stock does justice to Cuneo’s canvases.