Go to the photograph
By Jim Gardner
22 February 2007
I shot this image, which I call 'Close to the edge', partly as an homage to the group Yes and mostly because the subject, my mate Fintan, is - quite literally - close to a sheer drop down the side of a local natural monument - Roseberry topping, which sits on the border between North Yorkshire and the borough of Redcar and Cleveland, just outside Middlesbrough in the north east of England.
Amazing things happen when you make an effort and the day this photograph was taken is a lesson in that and it reminds me, whenever I look at it and the others I shot on that day, of a mantra I'd love to claim was my own, but I suspect I read somewhere else which is simple but effective in it's advice to anyone who wants to take better shots - go to the photograph.
Roseberry topping is something of a climb when you're as deeply unfit as me. But it was well worth the effort because not only did I take some spectacular shots of my part of the world from one of it's highest vantage points, but the BBC used one of the more dramatic shots I took in the series, as that day's weather map background, on the regional news - which might sound small fry to some, but it put a smile on my face and is a good example of how going to where the photograph is has it's rewards.
I drift off in my imagination sometimes and wish I could go to the photographs in India and Japan and Australia and exotic locations around the world. I even, perhaps naively, wish I could go to the photographs in Iran and Afghanistan and Zimbabwe - all a million miles away from the sleepy village of Stockton on Tees.
They say writers should write about what they know and I suppose it makes sense to say that photographers should shoot what they know and I certainly know Stockton. I hope the reader can detect the irony of describing it as a sleepy village when looking at the photographic evidence to the contrary in my shots of the town center and a certain sense of pride that Stockton is also trying to change from a dirty industrial town to a cultural center of arts and education.
The barrage, constructed astride the river Tees to filter pollution and detritus which had effectively killed the river in the past decades is a fine monument to that effort for improvement. It sits at the end of a huge new complex of buildings for Teesside university, where students from around the world learn how to make animated films for Pixar and Dreamworks.
I try whenever I shoot my home town to keep in mind it's chemical and industrial past and how difficult or unnerving it might be for some of it's older residents to contrast that against today's no-smoking wine bars, £3 a pop coffee shops and glass facade arts centers.
I took a shot of Stockton's high street - once the widest in Europe - and realized when I got the shot home I'd inadvertently snapped an old man with his shopping bag, staring off into the distance as if to echo the concerns his generation that much has happened, but little has changed around these parts.
After all, it's not the first time new ideas about how to rejuvenate Stockton have come along in his lifetime. The hallucinogenic architecture of the late 1960's shopping centre is a cue to the efforts of previous council officials, deaf to the cry for better housing and dazzled by the lure of change for the sake of it and the promise of election time favor; more than any small town in the north east of England could realistically deliver.
In the end, Stockton is a place you look forward to leaving, but you always come back to. It's other great claim to fame is that the first ever passenger railway ran OUT of it, to Darlington. Even the great industrialists could see it's potential as a great place to escape from. Although, to be fair, it certainly isn't the worst place in the world to call home, but if I'm to take my own advice and go to the photograph of lions on the Savannah, or the bright lights of Tokyo, there can be no greater incentive than the reminders in these photographs that photographs don't come to you, no matter how long you wait.
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