Echoes and Shadows
A series of 30 images made in the North East.

Remnants of the coal industry today, that connect with the communities as they were then.  There are also images linked to film locations used in ‘Get Carter’ around Tyneside - some of the locations are still traceable. Leigh spent hours trying to find them on maps, then he’d wait for the right drama in the lighting and ‘buy’ an atmospheric ‘look’ to them by working in monochrome.

Most of the images are monochrome darkroom prints, showing a compact brick and terrace world, working men’s clubs, miners institutes and the inevitable pit-head silhouettes, capturing Leigh’s own  ‘soured’ nostalgia, by using whatever relics he could find - narrow streets, drifting smoke, morning fog.

Searching out fractured details on the beaches of ‘The Coal Coast’ gives the images a connection of sorts to what was here before. There is some kind of legacy measured out in the discarded spoil, and in the rusted tools fused into the magnesium limestone rocks.  What’s not been cleaned up still shows the wasted nature of this landscape, with its echoes and shadows of a recent and recognisable past, when the National Coal Board showed utter contempt for the landscape it raped. The ghosts of another day stalk this barren coastline, with the constant hiss and crash of the North Sea and feathered grey skies adding to its mood and isolation. The beaches show a brutal, vibrantly coloured beauty in orange iron oxides, sulphur yellows and deep brown rust, set into a grey, coal flecked slurry that slowly disappears with every receding tide.

3rd December 2009 - 12th January 2010
Monday to Friday 9.30am - 4.30pm

The Royal Photographic Society
122 Wells Road
Bath. BA2 3AH
01225 325733