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A lost world caught on film
An insider and an outsider turned their camera lenses on a landscape which looks distant but familiar. Justine Gaunt reports.
I still can't understand very well why people have been so interested in my photographs," says Eric Jaquier. Forty years ago, at the age of 23, Eric spent a month in the Leeds suburbs working as a door-to-door salesman for Betterwear.
What brought him here was his then-wife who was studying French at the university. During this time, he took every opportunity to focus his new Nikon F camera on whatever caught his eye at street level. And as a man used to Swiss levels of neatness and order at home, trudging around the tatty back streets must have been quite an eye-opener.
"I remember the overwhelming smell of coal fires," says Jaquier recalling an age of blackened buildings and almost carless streets. Almost 40 years on, Jaquier returned to Leeds "out of curiosity", and has been surprised by the reception his photographs have received. Later this month an exhibition of them will open in the city.
His compelling images show children playing, or on bikes in the streets and back alleyways, housewives in aprons and curlers hanging out white bed linen across the street and adverts over corner shops that recall Arkwright's in Open All Hours. A sense of lost innocence and poignancy suffuses these scenes.
Strangely perhaps, Eric Jaquier was not depressed by the surroundings he encountered. He even remembers Leeds as being exotic – and he had a sense that Burley, in particular, was on the brink of enormous changes. This was the time that great slices of the city's back-to-back landscape were being razed to make way for estates and tower blocks, the urban planning dream of the 1960s and '70s which often became the urban nightmare of the '80s and '90s. He was drawn to Armley and Burley "because they were the places that looked most like the end of the 19th century. Many of the buildings were due to be demolished and people were leaving the area. Some houses were already boarded up, and in some streets there wasn't much life at all.
"To me, taking these kinds of pictures was a way to remember a world that was gone or disappearing. I was fascinated. Also with the idea that the '60s were disappearing." He says it was curiosity pure and simple curiosity that brought him back to Leeds last December. He was unprepared for the reaction that his images have created, and continues to be baffled by it. Partially because for him, much of what he photographed hasn't really changed. "The Harold Streets and Crescents, Alton Place, Conference Place, some haven't changed at all," he muses.
See more images>>Exhibiting alongside him will be Leeds-based photographer Peter Mitchell, who first arrived in the city shortly after Jaquier in the early 1970s. He's been photographing it for the last 30 years – looking at all the little places, fish and chip shops, old bakeries and garages, dance halls, mills and the Quarry Hill flats. It has earned him the title of the Alan Bennett of photography.
Both men have documented a place largely ignored for its architectural history. Often theirs are the only records, and as the city centre is cleared to make way for towering skyscrapers of luxury apartments and offices, it is only now that people have begun to question or discuss what went before.
"You never know what you've lost until it's gone," says Peter Mitchell. "In the 1970s, Leeds was gearing up for change. It was still a 'high' Victorian city with Boar Lane 'the finest Victorian street in Britain' but fast becoming the 'motorway city' it proclaimed on its postmarks.
"There was the powerful thrill of being totally inundated by change (the town being far smaller than a metropolis) but also with the destruction of Boar Lane, say, or the creation of the great deserts that were once workers' terraces in south Leeds, a kind of foreboding set in coupled with a sense of urgency."
Mitchell captured the demolition of the Quarry Hill Flats – designed in 1930s to do away with the squalor and deprivation of slum living. They were conceived out of a utopian vision of social housing and were ultimately flattened due to their utter failure to function in the planned manner. The West Yorkshire Playhouse was later constructed on the site, as much a symbol of its times as its predecessor. The flats were supposed to be revolutionary – a housing solution designed to bring people to the city centre, paving the way for a modern society in which work and living occurred within walking distance of each other in a thoroughly urban environment. The Playhouse points to a different era where leisure and the arts came to represent the cultural and financial ambitions of the city. Jaquier's and Mitchell's styles of photography are vastly different. But the sense of a disappearing past is common to both their work. Mitchell retains an impartial distance from his subject matter, and stresses that the work is not about nostalgia, or politics. "I'm not political, I'm an agitator. I keep up with politics in the Everyman sense, I'm working-class Labour. There's a lyric in a Dylan song – 'always on the wrong side of whatever side there was'. That's me."
Perhaps in contrast to Jaquier, Mitchell has a strong sense of the relevance of his work. It's a catalogue of the life and times of a city – constant, relentless. Mitchell himself has barely left the place in over 35 years – for him, the city represents a microcosm of life.
Eric Jaquier lived in Kirkstall Road during his time in Leeds and used the bathroom as a darkroom. On his return to Switzerland, a handful of the shots were published in a French-language magazine in 1970. This was the first time he had had any work published professionally, and he went on to work as a freelance photographer for magazines and as a radio journalist.
The material was out of sight and memory, for three decades. In 2005, a selection of the photographs resurfaced for a solo show at a gallery in Lausanne, where they generated great interest.
Eric Jaquier says of the Leeds he found in 1969: "At that time, the city centre didn't exist. It was almost a village centre. We didn't go there much. Today, the city centre seems too far away from the suburbs. The centre is overwhelming, and the suburbs are still sleeping!"
Another change is the traffic. "There are cars everywhere, of course, but there seems to be an incredible number of cars in Leeds. England is going to die under all these cars." Maybe this is where Leeds comes full circle. Current city centre developments are designed, much as the Quarry Hill flats were, to combine all needs within a small geographical area. Leeds – a place to work and play is the estate agents' sales line.
The success of this latest planning idea, whether it will reduce commuting and raise the quality of life, remains to be seen – and photographed.
Strangely Familiar, an exhibition of photographs of Leeds by Eric Jaquier and Peter Mitchell, February 27 to May 10, Project Space Leeds, Whitehall Waterfront, Leeds. www.projectspaceleeds.org.uk
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Saturday 26 May 2012
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