A view of Hull
Still Occupied
Images on this site are arranged into rough areas by location as in my book 'Still Occupied', available on Blurb. Eventually this site will contain all the images in that book and more.
The area around Abbey St has changed since I took these pictures and I cannot identify all the exact locations. A B Rooms, Lock and Safe Engineers (see previous picture in this section) had premises in Field St, but later moved to new buildings in Abbey St close by. Their building in Field St has been considerably altered since I took that picture, but can still be recognised, just a short distance down the street from Holderness Rd on the west side.
I can find no information about 'Reynard Building...' in Hull. If Carl Sharp reads this he many well know more! I think it was probably in Abbey St (as I recorded on the contact sheet).
This is perhaps another picture that is more about the formal qualities, and in particular three rectangles, and the contrast between a black aperture and the white painted area on the wall. There is a kind of reprise at the left of the image with three vertical rectangles of doorways. I don't think I would have made an exposure without the tree or the name 'Carl Sharp' written so confidently. But it's a view of a derelict corner of a city whose changes I was recording and made at a time when I was striving to put form to work in the pursuit of content.
Working with the shift lens (or a view camera with movements) as I did on most of the Hull pictures is a rather different exercise to taking pictures with normal positionally fixed lenses. It enables the photographer to establish a point of view and then to precisely place the edges of the frame, moving the whole frame left, right, up or down a considerable amount. I've chosen to keep the verticals upright, chosen to stand on a particular line that places the distant pale door next to the larger gate on the corner, and to stand at a distance so that the frame cuts the doorway at left and also fills the right of the frame with a wall which actually on close inspection curves away at the extreme edge.
What I couldn't control is the actual aspect ratio of the frame, and like all of the pictures from Hull this is presented without cropping. But I am tempted to remove that last brick or two at the right. The Olympus had a good viewfinder which showed almost all of the image, and a tiny bit also gets removed in the scanning and squaring for printing, but we may be seeing just a tad more than appeared in the viewfinder when I was making the image.
Peter Marshall
01784 456474
