Goodbye The Moulders Arms : Ian Beesley - Life, A Retrospective

Ian Beesley has been well served by decline. As a documenter of lives and times in transition, this photographer of fifty years standing was fortunate, or possibly unfortunate, to be present at moments of irrevocable change. From an unprepossessing start as a worker in the valley basement midden of what used unflatteringly to be known as ‘Esholt Shit Works’, Beesley’s personal trajectory is an ironic inversion of the mostly urban landscapes that he records; his success has been predicated, at least in part, upon post-industrial erosion, the clearing of mills and slums and the consequences of redundancy.

That Beesley conceives much of his work in black and white is not a deliberate means of capturing mood in atmospheric monotone, though the inference still obtains; his explanation is more prosaic: by his own admission he was too skint when starting out in the early Seventies to invest in colour film. This accident of economic circumstance was serendipitous. Finding real beauty in the transitory, in changing demographics and in signifying moments, Ian Beesley renders a counterpoint to Martin Parr’s distinct style: if the latter’s parti-coloured tableaux illustrate working class Britain at play, then Beesley’s monochrome landscapes are drained, withered, emblematic sometimes, of a cultural grieving process. Which is not to suggest that Life : A Retrospective is an unrelenting study in grey; there is consolation in transience, in the knowledge that the flattening of urban hinterlands may, will, result in transformation.

In fact, one of the few concessions Beesley makes to colour in this beautiful collective ballad of a photographic anthology, is in the very final frames: 'Born in Bradford' is a celebration of birth, of diversity, that demands a vivacity of texture entirely synchronous with the prevailing mood of recalibration and hope. In the same spirit of constructive regeneration, it is fitting that many of the images appearing in the book should have been preceded by an exhibition at Salt’s Mill, itself a monument to reinvention that still smells faintly of the machine oils soaked into its floors over many generations. That the inspired thinking of the late Jonathan Silver ensured the mill’s creative survival is a measure of that same capacity for endurance and relearning that Ian Beesley’s work necessarily foreshadows. As Zoe Silver notes, in a perceptive Introduction to the book, of the photographer who was once awarded the Kodak Scholarship for Social Documentation:



….whose existence, she might have added, thrives in the interstices between past, present and future. Poised on the cusp of radical change – the sewage works heading down the pan, the mill closures, the Moulders Arms on Bradford’s Sticker Lane serving its final pint – the photographs are valedictory, to be inscribed in the recesses of regional memory. It is difficult to know whether Ian Beesley was aware, at the outset of a career arrived at by accident as much as design, of the gathering significance of his work – photographic images often acquire shadows of elegy after the event and in the wake of tectonic contextual shifts. What sets Beesley apart from social realists of the past and present, yet what also, to some degree, unites his work with Bill Brandt, Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen and Marc Davenant, is the nailing of Barthes’ idea of Punctum, or the memorializing of moments in the ‘grab’. But few have etched industrial decline in the faces of his subjects like Beesley: at work and at play, in images that are, at once, elegiac and cheerful, infused with pathos and invoking vicarious sadness. The observer passing through the upper gallery of Salt’s Mill couldn’t fail to detect irony in photographs that depict the architecture of decay on floors that used to echo with the clattering of machinery, and occlude sorters in blizzards of airborne wool. Not least in the image of the last loom being removed from the mill on 27th February, 1986, whose ‘punctum’ of the significant historical moment describes, in precise location and if only in the imagination, the vigorous chatter – human and machine – that was obliged by circumstance to retreat into silence.

That sense of future unease is indirect, conferred on the images by what Beesley’s audience knows of the subsequent decades. But sometimes we make inferences based purely on what we see: the haunting photographs of Esholt Sewage Works, of its Press room, and engine, and of its grinning faces amidst a stink that is nearly palpable, culminate in a photograph of a worker who has just received his redundancy notice. That we cannot clearly see his expression beneath a capacious flat cap does not disguise the drained demeanour, or the tears that Beesley assures us fell in the letter’s wake. Here, in a nondescript Platelayer’s cabin, a window is opened on grief, on the fracturing of a comradely social nexus cherished for the duration of a working life - and it is utterly heartbreaking.

The effect is repeated in 'Goodbye the Moulders Arms', Beesley’s paean to a lost Bradford pub, and the life invested in it, a series of images taken during the time leading up to its final closure. The Moulders’ chiaroscuro shadows and boozing denizens, mouths open decanting silent conversation, conceal a genuinely time-enshrined beating heart. The final frames, separated by just two days in June, 1982, juxtapose an in-lit, welcoming pub frontage with the boarded-up face of its redundant successor, both conceived against darkening skies and with a single street lamp illuminating the former. The poet Ian McMillan, who has often worked in collaboration with Beesley, crystallizes the latter’s art throughout the collection, and no more affectingly than here, in a poem of storied memory, of change and acceptance, whose title calls time for good:

‘In the corner, a bloke still sings
Someone fetches
A pie. All things pass:

Time’s map is unfolded,
Creased, damaged.
History pauses. Is moulded
By an image.’ (‘Time, Please. Time.’)

Time is now called, too, on the productive employment of many mills, foundries and engineering shops of the old West Riding, whose trellis-work of ginnels and cobbles, and ‘clean-sliced cliffs’ of stately frontages sustain, but are now re-designated as bijou apartments, loft spaces and fitness centres. ‘Thro the Mills’, Beesley’s hymn to millstone towns on the edge of socio-economic repurposing, captures a time – between the late Seventies and mid-Eighties – when these titanic mills were approaching an end. There is irony in the presence of workers of the first and second generations of the Asian diaspora placed front and centre in many of Beesley’s pictures. Still grafting, still anchored to this, for many, alien existence, inclusion in the photographer’s oeuvre is a measure both of his pride in the all-encompassing canopy of a labour-intensive Bradford workplace, and an objective observation of a demography in transition. But best of all, amongst the warehouses, workshops and bustling machinery of an age documented for posterity, are the damp, uneven pathways and ginnels foregrounding chimneys and lowering mills: ‘Albert Terrace’, ‘The Snicket’, ‘Black Warehouses’ are wonderfully stylized mirrors to Brandt’s seminal ‘Snicket in Halifax’ of 1937.

Ian Beesley’s offbeat and engaging introductions to each section resonate with authenticity, make of the photographs templates for a city’s teeming history. The ‘Dreams and Promises’ sequence of images are commemorative portraits of elderly Bradford citizens, caught by the camera - sometimes animatedly, often reflectively – at the very end of their lives. An accompanying ‘story’ is provided by Beesley for each portrait, giving context to each soldier, each mender and each bricklayer, like Wilfred Starkey, who grew up, as did so many, in abject poverty in the city. Conveying weakness, stoicism, even regret, the images are painterly in tone, beautifully rendered, and yielding an achingly affecting counterpoint to one of the book’s earlier chapters. ‘Street Life’, whose robust harnessing of a cross-city, cross-cultural urban terrain invigorates a scruffy architectural backdrop with youthful vim, is a hymn to finding joy in a wasteland, and bears comparison with Tish Murtha's more or less contemporaneous studies of unemployment in Newcastle. Kids on bikes, arsing about in cemeteries and romping on a Henry Moore sculpture are playing to the gallery, yet remain wedded to the idea of fun in perpetuity, as assimilated to context as a chip shop on Valley Parade sporting its menu in Urdu and English, and as enduring as the image of another fish shop, this time ‘Gray’s’ of North Wing, by June 1977 the final remaining building on a street that has otherwise succumbed to the wrecking ball.

The irony is never lost on Beesley, who lets the camera do the work of suggestion, and remains properly silent when further elaboration is unnecessary. No more so than in one of the most profoundly moving sequences of the book. In many ways a departure, Beesley’s photographs of the Moor Psychiatric Hospital in Lancaster of 1994 are a study in empathy and compassion. Standing back from his subjects, he infuses his portraiture with a sense of detachment tempered by dignity. Captured, again, towards the end of an era of collective management of mental health problems – Thatcher’s ‘Care in the Community’ programme meant no care at all for many – Beesley was enshrining the final act of a drama of memory, confusion, and reorientation through photography, in his then capacity of Artist in Residence at the institution. The images are extraordinary: almost unbearably moving, Beesley reminds us in explanatory annotation, that several of the patients were very long-term, having been committed, often, as teenagers, on catch-all grounds that frequently equated insanity with a lack of moral rectitude. One such was Dolly, an elderly lady who’d been incarcerated in her early teens for having an illegitimate child. Beesley’s photograph of her holding a picture of a baby, and crying, is astonishingly powerful, a reminder of a life stopped at source, a life unlived, a life that might have been…

Ian McMillan’s simple, beautiful poem, ‘Let’s go walking’, was composed after seeing Beesley’s luminous photograph of Lily Maynard, aged 99. But it might so easily have been about Dolly:

‘Show us the past now, hold it
Tightly along its faultlines,
Lily, can’t you? Tightly, Lily.
Your life has been waiting for him,
And the clock stayed silent,
Lily, didn’t it? Time is broken.

Come on, Lily.
Let’s go walking,
We’ll talk as we’re walking
And pretend you’re young again,
Lily.’