A favourite photograph

 

Sometimes people ask me if I have a favourite photograph among all those I have taken. Of course I have many. I recall ones of my children and especially one taken in Normandy around 1994, them walking ahead of me aged 2 and four holding hands as the sun cast a wonderful glow on the summer lane that evening. I have pictures of friends, some now passed away and of places which help me recall events. I also have photographs which were challenging in one way or another or required a lot of planning or else happened right in front of me that I captured out of good luck rather than any skill. It is surprising to me how much I can recall about the circumstances of photographs taken many years ago when all else about the circumstance or place has been forgotten.

 

But if pressed then I always come back to this picture which was taken in Liverpool around 2010. It is fairly nondescript although as an architectural picture it has some merit in balance, compositional terms and colour. The reflective surface helps, but it has a more significant memory and a holds a metaphor for me as well.

Not only is Liverpool a sea-faring city but my father was a seaman, working for Shell all his life. This building, which rears like the prow of a massive ship with a seagull flying past in the glowing clouds, reminds me of that. It stands at the edge of an old graving dock next to Albert Dock, much gentrified in recent years and certainly an improvement on when I used to crawl under fencing to access the old warehouses with my camera in my late teens. 

The area is called Mann Island and in the late 1960's a prefabricated hut stood on the site which served as the offices of the British Shipping Federation. This was a sort of benevolent society which paid seaman an allowance when they were "between ships" and waiting to go to sea again. For whatever reason their pay was allowed alongside any unemployment benefit they could claim for being out of work. So in a corner of the BSF office was a small area which served as an office of The Ministry of Labour - as it was still called then - and I worked there with a couple of other people calculating and making the weekly benefit payments to the around 200 or so seaman each week. I was 17 and it was a fun time. Poetry and music abounded in the pubs and clubs, Penny Lane became famous, and All You Need Is Love was all you needed at a party along with a Party Seven of Worthington Special. Alan Ginsberg had even declared the city the centre of the universe in a recent visit!

   It might be offices now (and house the lovely Open Eye photography gallery) but for me it is the prow of that proud ship, reflecting a past as well as the noisy seagull of my youth and with its open windows looking like portholes, It reminds me that time sails on. 

I had a great time that year and it helped make me who I am and yet, it is an ordinary photograph which no-one else might look at more than once or twice........