Award-winning Bradford photographer launches new project telling stories of the city's people
Last month award-winning Bradford artist, photographer and filmmaker Carolyn Mendelsohn launched her latest project Still Lives, Living Stories: The Heart of Bradford with two events at Bradford Industrial Museum.
The project was inspired by the extraordinary Belle Vue photographic archive which is held by Bradford Museums and Galleries. The photographs and negatives in the collection come from Belle Vue photographic studio which was located on Manningham Lane in Bradford from 1926 until 1975. There are several thousand portraits of individuals, couples, families and groups of friends or relatives taken over the course of fifty years and together they form a fascinating social document of Bradford and the people who lived there during the early to mid-20th century. Many of the photographs were portraits of people who had migrated to the city from other countries and would have their portrait taken, then send it back to their families abroad. Over the past few years Bradford Museums and Galleries, the University of Leeds and the National Media Museum have worked together to begin digitising the photographs so that they can be accessed by the public.
“I have always been really fascinated by that archive,” says Mendelsohn. “When the studio closed in the mid-70s all the pictures and negatives were thrown into a skip. Luckily, 17,000 glass negatives were rescued and put into an archive. I have always been really enchanted by it and how it tells people’s stories. Just before the pandemic I was thinking about how great it would be to reimagine the archive and create a new piece of work that echoes it, with people living in the city and district today. I did a bit of research with archivist John Ashton, the curator of the archive. Looking at the portraits, people often held objects and often people then sent that portrait home to where their family was. It is such a brilliant document and I wanted to create a new body of work in response to it. That was the starting point. It was an idea that had been percolating for quite a while.”
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People were invited to the launch events, which took place on August 21 and 22 and to bring along an object that had a particular meaning or significance for them. “The launch days were really beautiful,” says Mendelsohn. “The idea was to get people interested and the response was great. People had the opportunity to look through the archive, we had some projected images and I set up a little studio if people wanted to have their portraits taken. It was amazing, lots of people came along and there were lovely conversations happening about community and family, all connected to the archive.” Several people who attended the event recognised some of the faces in the archive and a few had brought objects they were photographed with. “One lady who is an artist brought her grandfather’s hand-painted print of Burma where he had been during the war; he painted maps for the army and a young brother and sister brought the objects that are important to them – a cricket bat and a guitar.” The photographs Mendelsohn took on the launch days are test shots, a bit like sketches, not the final portraits. Those will be taken with her sitters in the style of the original Belle Vue Studio portraits at a later date. A separate still-life photograph of the object will be taken as well as an audio recording of the personal story connected to the object. “There are some beautiful stories,” says Mendelsohn. “I spoke with one couple who told me that they met at a Northern Soul disco in the 1970s and they said that their precious object would be their vinyls. They said they will come back with some of their records.”
This is just the start of a planned ongoing project in which Mendelsohn will continue to collect portraits and audio recordings. Her creative practice is rooted in storytelling and her projects frequently give voice to stories that are seldom heard; this latest one looks set to do the same. “I believe that everyone has a story to share and objects often hold memories that connect us to people, places or important moments in our lives,” she says. “This is an exciting way of using an archive to help create a new one that links to it, and to the beating heart of Bradford.”
There are two more events with Carolyn Mendelsohn at Bradford Industrial Museum on October 23 and 24. To take part or to find out more please email [email protected]