When I first put a series of photos together and tried to think of a title for it I came up against a blank wall.  I seemed to be forcing the little darlings into a strait jacket.  I think I may not be alone because I am often struck when leafing through photobooks of how many are couched in vague abstractions: time, memory, identity and so on.  I even came across one the other week about  “the dualities of mortality”.   My tastes run to rather earthier topics so when I spotted a photobook recently entitled Steel-Oil-Steam I was onto it like a flash.  I got round my self-imposed limit of £20 (it costs £24) by the simple ruse of inviting someone to buy it for me as a Christmas present.  Clever, eh?

It’s a lovely little book of text and photographs by Tom Evans and Terry Hulf* which takes as its subject the doings of the Kent and East Sussex Railway - a heritage line which runs from Tenterden in Kent to Bodiam in East Sussex.  Its 80-some pages depict locomotives, lines, hardware, workshops, employees and volunteers and the photographs are interspersed with quotes from these two latter about work and life on the line.  An introductory essay quite properly concerns itself with the workings of the line and leaves the photos to speak for themselves.

The camera used for the series was a 15” x 12” ultra large format model made by J T Chapman here in Manchester in the 1880s, the characteristics of which lend a timeless quality to the 21st century.  This look is doubtless the product of its lens (the 1875 original) and, I think, also the use of orthochromatic film – an early type of film emulsion which is less sensitive to the full colour spectrum.  So the whole series of images is characterised mostly by a range of clear but dark tones well-fitted to the steel, oil, gleam and grime of its subject.

The disappearance of heavy industry from the UK over the last several decades mostly leaves us only with memories of its very distinctive shapes.  There were the large-scale blast furnaces, goods trains, half-built ships and coke ovens  of course. But there were also smaller scale forms around us - tools, signs, workboots, hands, waste - perhaps unnoticed at the time, whose blacks, silvers and greys were enhanced by a patina of filings and oilstains which you can see quite clearly in these pictures: like this one below, for example.

(And as anyone who has been in one will know – it’s not only the shapes of a workshop.  It’s also the smells.  On my lunchtime walks around Hull where I used to work I was always drawn inexorably to a small general engineering shop where I would hang around outside its double doors and suck in the narcotic scent of ground metal to counter the sterility of my morning in the office.)

The locomotives themselves, the wheels and the rails and the steel sheeting all set up basic visual forms: cylinder, circle, line and rectangle which draw the eye around the images in a way I find rather reassuring.  They remind me of a quote from Saint Exupéry that I once wrote down and for which I no longer have the source.  He was talking about the lines of an aircraft and said that they seemed not so much to have been designed as discovered.  The same is true of these locomotive images: the basic forms are timeless and were once pressed into service around us over and over again. Yet they seem less noticeable now, as if the modern world of colour had hidden them.

 Maybe it’s my age.  Maybe it takes me back to my boyhood.  But I do have adult form in these matters as well.  For several decades I rode and fettled my own ageing motorcycles in my homebuilt workshop.  You can’t explain the intoxication of  maintaining machinery in working order.  It keeps you very grounded.

So - without wanting to romanticise - there is a kind of intoxication in this world and it comes in the portraits and quotations which run through the book.  In a sense (and I may be rather cleaving towards the abstract myself here) you might say that one of the book’s themes is the enthusiasm that clearly binds all the workers together.

Here are a couple of the quotes.

“I wake up in the morning looking forward to going to work and hate it at the end of the day when I have to go home.  I would love to just stay and carry on.” (Jamie Clapp.)

A steam engine is the most spectacular and engaging form of power.  You can see it, hear it and smell it.  The exhaust steam, smoke, and motion stimulate all the senses.”  (Richard Moffatt.)

(Which puts me in mind of the immortal words of a Brummie motorcyclist I once fell into deep conversation with.  I’ve never forgotten them.  “Choice of tyre lever, Peter…..” he said, looking me in the eye “……it’s a very personal thing.”)

Steel-Oil-Steam definitely gets my Photobook of 2020 award.  It’s true that it was the only 2020 photobook that I actually bought, since all the others were secondhand, but so what?  It’s a lovely unassuming little publication which raises the spirits and certainly has my warmest recommendation. 

Steel-Oil-Steam, Evans + Hulf, Samson Press, 2020, £24.  You can buy the book from the website link which is in bold in the first paragraph above.  Also, Tom Evans will be giving a Royal Photographic Society talk - on Zoom, of course -about the camera, the photographs and the book on 4 February. Details are at https://rps.org/Steam. Tickets are free and bookings come with a special offer to buy the book at a discount.  See you there.

(Copyright in all photographs and quotations in this blogpost rests with Evans + Hulf to whom I’m grateful for permission to reproduce.)