Legacy part 1

I was tidying up the other day when I picked up this old Agfa Silette that was sitting on a cupboard top, and it got me reminiscing about my journey in photography.

So lets begin with the Agfa, this camera belonged to my father, he had 2 cameras this one and another I think my brother has, This one was his second camera, his first was used for 35 transparency film while the Agfa was used for B/W. The colour slide film was sent off for processeing but the B/W was far more exciting as it was processed at home, This meant blacking out the kitchen and converting it into a home darkroom. As a kid I was sometimes allowed to watch the creation of prints, from that moment I was hooked by the magic of watching an image develop in a tray of chemicals and it has never left me.

When I was about 14 I discovered that our school had a photography club, we got permission from the art dept to create a darkroom, I have no idea where we got the kit from but it got us started, I can remember the excitement when someone got a ‘real’ camera, a cheap Russian SLR. No one really knew what we were doing, we just experiment, but it was fun.

I left school at 18 and got a job as a lab technician, a the interview they explained they needed someone to do the dept’s photography, obviously I told them I could do it…! Anyway I found out when I joined the work was creating slides for lectures, prints for publication and photomicroscopy, none of which I had experience of, so I spent a couple of weeks locked in a darkroom with some books, I also discovered, luckily, no one else there had a clued how to do it. The dept I worked in research vision running various tests on patients, while running these I discovered I was colour blind, hence my preferred medium of B/W.

Aa a part of my training I was sent weekly to technical college to study many aspects of laboratory work including phoptography which helped fill in the bits I hadn’t taught myself.

Over the next few years I worked as a photographic technician in 2 other research groups, most of my work was preparing slides and poster exhibits for international conferences and publications, I used to joke that my work had been exhibited in more countries than most fashion photographers, but without the recognition howeverr this work dried up rapidly when Powerpoint and similar software entered the scene. I left the technician role for an office based job and all my photography became personal, that’s a story for another day.0