Report by Marjorie Burge.
On Friday 5th October our guest speaker was Tony Othen from Greenwich, with ‘Looking back is no bad thing’. Tony was looking back fifty years to the very beginning of his career, when photography was film and dark room. So much has changed since then. His beautiful mono prints and projected images showed the social history of what it was like in the late 60’s and early 70’s. Taken in the industrial cities – ‘Get Carter’ country – with real people as the stars, Tony’s aim was to show the social history of how people lived, with a view to encouraging improvement for people who were, knowing no different, content with what they had. Straight rows of terraced houses, doors opening straight onto the narrow pavements, housewives in curlers and aprons, small children playing in the empty streets; tall smoking chimneys in the background where the fathers and sons were working.
Inside the houses, granddads sat in the kitchen, by the cooking range, smoking their pipes…
On Friday 5th October our guest speaker was Tony Othen from Greenwich, with ‘Looking back is no bad thing’. Tony was looking back fifty years to the very beginning of his career, when photography was film and dark room. So much has changed since then. His beautiful mono prints and projected images showed the social history of what it was like in the late 60’s and early 70’s. Taken in the industrial cities – ‘Get Carter’ country – with real people as the stars, Tony’s aim was to show the social history of how people lived, with a view to encouraging improvement for people who were, knowing no different, content with what they had. Straight rows of terraced houses, doors opening straight onto the narrow pavements, housewives in curlers and aprons, small children playing in the empty streets; tall smoking chimneys in the background where the fathers and sons were working.
Inside the houses, granddads sat in the kitchen, by the cooking range, smoking their pipes…