THE CRESCENT, SALFORD 5.20AM I felt panicky this morning, and I wasn’t entirely sure why. I struggled to balance my tripod on the central reservation of the main through route from the East Lancs, and although Manchester looked beautiful in the steamy early morning, it seemed just too far away to bring me what I wanted. People passing by on their way home from night shifts, stooped and unlikely to make old bones, looked at me with concern, acknowledging as […]
WATER STREET, MANCHESTER 5.36AM It would seem that we can no longer expect the summer to remain in its expected place anymore. The warmth of remembered childhood days has now slipped beyond the start of the new school year, and September has become the month when we go to work in our shirt sleeves, as did I on this room temperature dawn. When it is this balmy, and I’m out under a night sky, with the world lit and coloured […]
RIVERSIDE, SALFORD, 5.28AM Often I’m already en route when I decide where I’ll go to photograph, simply following the course of fate and instinct to bring me to my destination. And, on this late summer morning, I fetched up at the River Irwell near Adelphi Street, along whose muddied sides human settlement is once again thriving. As I turned down neat, new streets, and came suddenly upon a footbridge, I realised how little I knew of the river’s course once […]
NEW BRIDGE STREET 3.10AM – 4.50AM Since starting this particular series of Not Quite Light I’ve realized quite how little I know about the Irwell. Its path is that of an uncoiling snake, and I couldn’t easily draw it out if asked. It’s a river that, during the industrial revolution, both Manchester and Salford turned their backs on, polluting it for profit, and it often feels hidden away like an embarrassing member of the family that they don’t know what […]
COW LANE, SALFORD 3.14AM – 4.15AM The turning point of the year, the Longest Day, had not long ended when I arrived. The much heralded Strawberry Moon was losing its fight with overpowering clouds that, for now, reflected prismatic city lights and lunar brilliance but which, at daybreak, would be revealed as grey and unloved. I settled next to a cement works that hummed and clanked, but revealed no human form, despite there being several illuminated huts. Away in the […]