There’s something about a photograph which depicts a human-made world, but is devoid people, that gets me every time.
They lure me in and spark the storyteller in my head; who once lived there, what was their life like, where are they now?
And even when there are glimpses of people going about their daily lives, I’m fascinated by the fact I will (very probably) never know them. This moment is the only connection I will ever have.
Berris Conolly’s book, Sheffield Photographs 1988 - 1992 brims with a sense of time and place, in a city I’ve never been and know little about.
It calls from the recent past, and I wonder how much Sheffield has changed since these images were taken.
All black and white, the photographs provide a stark insight into the area of more than two decades ago.
Pubs, boarded up or seemingly waiting for signs of life, feature in the opening pages.
They rub shoulders with litter strewn abandoned spaces, pretty urban parks, the River Don reflecting life along its banks, and the ominous industrial buildings and machinery that were the lifeblood of the city.
A particular favourite for me is the image, Greasy Vera’s.
Taken in 1988, it shows an unloved food van slowly decaying in a derelict area. But it makes me want to know who Vera was.
Then there are the 1989 pictures of the Edgar Allen steel works.
I’d never heard of Edgar Allen but the book includes notes on the images from Adrian Wynn, in conversation with Berris Conolly. These photographs show the factory empty of industrious movement; instead they record the steel works last breaths, with one image showing six men who had just received their last pay checks.
Conolly had been commissioned to take these pictures as part of the city’s regeneration programme, and although many images speak to a time passed, the story of the city rebuilding and taking a new direction can be seen.
Geoff Nicholson’s introduction (I always read these sections after I view the photographs) provides a vivid account of life as a ’Sheffielder’. He says that even now he sees the city’s history like Conolly’s images, in black and white, but goes on to say, “…beneath the smog and coal dust, in the houses, in the pubs, at the football grounds, people of course lived their lives in full colour”.
And that’s how my imagination responds to this book, with a soap opera full of life and noise; I may not see it in all of these images, but I know it’s still there.
Published by Dewi Lewis Publishing, the photographs are enclosed in a silver-grey fabric cover, reflecting the ’Steel City’.