#398 – Library of Congess Images – Main Street Buffalo

I’m guessing that this photograph was taken by some intrepid photographer climbing a tall riverside gilding such as a grain elevator as for the most part, downtown Buffalo looks quite a low lying city with few tall buildings. What strikes me about this scene is the clear summer sky, as so many of the photographs…

#380 – Library of Congress Images – The Long Stairway, Pittsburgh

The photographs of Jack Delano have been featured before on this blog, and these were the documentary images of and around the railway. This is a slightly different subject matter and style of photography. There are a few different variations of this scene on the Library of Congress website, but this one just works best…

#372 – Library of Congress Images – Virginia coal trains

Boy this was hard work! The negatives were as rough as the environment they portray and must have been developed in gravy and moonshine. Most of the Library of Congress scans that you may have seen in earlier posts have required a few minutes work in Lightroom to give them some contrast and a bit…

#359 – Mechanical Landscapes Gallery Exhibition Now Open!

  After too many late nights and a lot of blood sweat and tears, my first exhibition opened today at my local independent bookshop, the delightful Ebb and Flo in Chorley. It’s only 12 framed A3 photographs, but the exhibition space is somewhat small and probably couldn’t take many more, so I’ve gone for quality…

#349 – Bank Bottom Mill

  Bank Bottom Mills in Marsden are a vast complex of mills that continued in production until 2003. On my brief visit in 2007, the mills appeared to be mothballed and still full of machinery, but still partially occupied. I did think they’d since been stripped, but having seen a number of reports on the…

#328 – Bridge of Change

I’ve posted before about the once-vast Leyland Motors works in Leyland. Its buildings sprawled for several miles from Lostock Hall right the way down into Leyland town centre, employing thousands of workers and manufacturing lorries for the home market and for export all over the world. Following privatisation it was bought by DAF who went…

#321 – The Last Days Of Bamber Bridge (New) Mill – 5

Once I’d got the main photos, I tried a few more experimental ones. I like to try to get different perspectives in an attempt to tell a bigger story, and the flexibility of a 14x zoom enabled me to do this easily. These are variations of one I took at Fernhurst Mill a few years back,…

#320 – The Last Days Of Bamber Bridge (New) Mill – 4

 The view from the north (end) The once monolithic landmark is reduced to a much more compact form. The demolition has been a methodical dismantling, and a relatively neat affair (or at least as neat as deconstructing thousands of tonnes of brick, concrete and other dusty, dirty materials can ever be), and just one section…

#319 – The Last Days Of Bamber Bridge (New) Mill – 3

The days of swinging a big iron ball are long gone, demolition these days is more like deconstruction. A long arm excavator with a powerful claw pulls the building apart, and then places all the material for recycling into big piles or straight into trucks. It does make for slow progress though, especially when there is…