Extract:
During the 1970s I attended a Lancashire secondary school. Perhaps, one of the more unusual ‘O’ Level options I chose was Art. I say, unusual, because I lacked dexterity, and couldn’t tell the difference between a Picasso and a Beano. However, several months into my Art studies, an off-shoot of the discipline presented itself, which certainly opened up an interesting divergence – photography.
So, whilst most of the other students diligently applied themselves in the Art classroom, a two-minute walk away, around the back of the school stage, over a period of months, I set to work with two long standing friends in the dark room to see how we could best exploit those unsupervised alternative curriculum hours.
For the sake of anonymity, I shall refer to these two chums, who are still good buddies, as Matt and Kev.
As the weeks rolled by, our bi-weekly trips to the dark room started to get a bit monotonous, with the focus for our attention being limited to the developing and printing of our photographic shoots from alongside railway lines, canals and the park lake.
However, our motivation levels rose the day that Matt brought in a collection of antique photographic equipment purchased by his father at a jumble sale a few days previous. I say antique, in all probability the goods were about twenty years old, but to us teenagers, that would have seemed like a lifetime ago.
We layered out this extensive range of gadgets and paraphernalia on the work bench and perused it, eventually picking up the least interesting looking items. They were a set of cannisters for storing rolls of film. One of them rattled, so we took its top off and tipped out the contents – a couple of undeveloped films spilled out.
Well, this had certainly aroused our curiosity. We closed the door, making sure that the external ‘No Entry’ infra-red warning light was on display to any potentially unwelcome visitors, and got to work.
Our main concern was that the films would be decades past their ‘use by’ date, making any viewable results quite unlikely. But we needn’t have worried. The images that appeared on the negatives were pristine and rather captivating to say the least…….
In full, see Lessons in Contraband
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