This is a series of photographs taken in the 1970's and early eighties. The work was produced in and around north Manchester, England, and shows the magical aspects of ordinary places, with emphasis placed upon natural forces working within the urban boundaries.
The cities of northern England have been photographed on many occasions, and the eye of the beholder has often been persuaded to see nothing more than the decaying remnants of the region's industrial past and present which have tended to clutter the collective consciousness of popular culture with regard to the North: grimy streets, dark buildings, satanic mills, rows of terraced houses etc. etc. etc.
Here, by way of contrast, the camera is focused on the detail, in preference to taking a more wide-ranging, panoramic, view of the region. These images reflect just a few of the multifarious instances of pure magic which lie waiting to be discovered in so many locations in any one of the post-industrial cities of northern England.
It is of paramount importance that these works should be viewed as a record of things observed in the urban environment, and not simply as arrangements that have been artificially created for the purposes of composition.
Each photograph is a record, pure and simple, albeit a record of pure magic - magic light, magic shapes, magic juxtapositions . . . Everything that can be seen here had a real existence in time and place and was not arranged in any way. This fact is in itself an intrinsically important part of their true meaning and their beauty.
In one sense, the images are presented as evidence that magic exists.
Bob McClelland
( Recent work, produced in Cornwall, can be seen on my other site: kernowimages )