A rather belated post for the "Home is..." project tonight. Back when we were shooting pics for the project last year, we planned a load of urban, industrial locations around the West Midlands, as a contrast with the more rural, pretty-mountainscapes we'd got in Wales. Then for a variety of reasons, mainly personal or work related, we didn't end up shooting anything after a brief (but productive) visit to the grounds of East Riddlesden Hall in West Yorkshire during April/May.
We still regretted not getting an industrial location though, and we still want to shoot some pics around the grittier parts of the West Mids when time permits, but whilst editing the selection for the forthcoming exhibition, we felt we really, really needed something a bit more urban for the show. And with literally a couple of months until the exhibition, and with the supposedly final selection made for the show, we made a slightly spur of the moment decision to shoot some more pics.
Theoretically, a slightly run-down mill town like Keighley should be able to provide a lot of abandoned industrial locations, but a mixture of fires, demolitions, and redevelopments have got rid of many shooting locations. That and the fact that actually a lot of the industrial buildings in Keighley are still in use in one form or another, means that we'd have needed permission for a shoot; we simply didn't have time to wait weeks for permission to go somewhere.
Happily, in a sense, there is a derelict gasworks on the edge of the town. This is awaiting demolition and replacement with a biomass power station, but there is a lot of publically accessible roads and waste ground around it. A quick recce on the way to work confirmed at least five spots to shoot in with the gasometers and other surviving buildings in shot, and a plan was made to get in and shoot a few pics from the 'public' side of the wire.
Again, for work and real-life reasons, not to mention the weather, the shoot became complicated and delayed to the point where only an early-afternoon finish at work gave time to get a shoot done. And typically, things went awry. Two van-loads of gas board employees occupied one of the locations, a wagon full of scrapmen (who didn't look favourably on someone with a camera nearby) were parked on the road... but we did manage to access the waste ground on the far side of the site.
By our standards, it was a quick shoot, but then practise makes perfect; the amount of these pictures we've shot over the last 14 months does mean we're pretty quick at setting up, shooting, and dismantling the set.
So there we are, the last shoot of the project, at least prior to the exhibition opening. We are planning on carrying this project on after this exhibition, and hitting some of the locations we did recce visits to last year (particularly in urban parts of the Midlands), but for now these are likely to be the last shots of the "Home is..." project for the time being.
(we're going to do a bit more of a detailed blog post on this shortly, but to remind anyone reading who is interested, the project is being exhibited at Cupola Contemporary Art in Hillsborough, Sheffield, from mid September to mid October).
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