Second Sight

On Monday I was interviewed by someone researching into women’s photography groups of the late 1970s and early 1980s. (She’s a historian. A historian! My past is history.)

I joined a women’s photography group in 1980, when starting on adult life in London. I was the youngest of five or six women. We called ourselves ‘Second Sight’. As a group, we only showed our work on two occasions: the first time, for a community project called ‘Hackney Creates’, and the second time – just before disbanding in the mid-80s – in a bespoke exhibition at Lauderdale House in North London.

Sitting now at a table in the British Library, the researcher asks me, ‘What was your group’s philosophy?’ I think: I dunno, we took pictures and showed them to each other in our kitchens. We were saying – at a time when that was still unusual – that photography, both as art and as a technical skill, was women’s work too (in a way, the Women Who Tech of our time). We were saying that women belonged in public spaces, not just private ones. We were interested in the stories of everyday life, not just the news ‘event’. The aesthetic was black and white, ideally with a black line around the image. (For those who care about such things, by the way, this was obtained by carefully filing back the edge of the enlarger’s negative carrier. Nowadays, you can get the effect in seconds on an iPhone app)

After the interview I dug out some prints. During the early 1980s, postcards were going through a revival and I had taken a photograph of mine to Walker Prints, to sell in London bookshops. One of my flatmates worked at Sisterwrite, but the collective wouldn’t stock the postcard because they thought cars were oppressive. On the back of the image still sitting in my personal archive, you can see the printer’s mark-up information, plus a sticker from the photography journal Camerawork, with a page number and issue date – the card was shown on its back page, along with a few others from that year.

The content of the image captures the political ‘graffiti’ art typical of the time. But it was the form, the physical matter of the image, that still gives the most pleasure. A gifted photographer had shown me how to develop film in a way that made every grain distinct, and the production of a print that might do this justice was the work of many hours in the foetal light of the darkroom. So was the experimentation with different photographic papers – the one shown here gave whites a beautiful luminosity – and grades of contrast. Every variation had to be tried on a separate piece of paper; exposed, dodged, burned, developed, stopped, fixed, washed and dried.