Millington

On finding the seeds for a project and rekindling a love for Black and White

2012 was a pivotal year for me in many ways. It was my first full year having moved jobs to work full time with a major strategy consulting firm. Time to devote to photography, which was always constrained, was suddenly at even more of a premium. It was also the year that I set out to learn black and white photography, development and many of the associated techniques.

I still remember the day when, at college in the 1980s, I developed my first black and white film and made my first darkroom print. That was real alchemy in my eyes and I was addicted to photography from that point onwards.

The real trigger to switch to black and white film was actually quite ridiculous. Fuji had once again mismanaged the UK film distribution market by claiming that Velvia was discontinued (again). In a fit of disgust I decided to start putting black and white film through my Technikardan and a few months later I also bought a Mamiya RZ67 to learn how to process roll film. By the end of the year I had been working with black and white most of the time and was saving my remaining Velvia 50 stock for trips to Mulgrave to progress the project I had underway there.

This particular Sunday morning I met up with Paul Moon again before dawn. We decided to work Millington Wood and I had a wonderful few hours wandering around the wood making images. It was really atmospheric and though I didn’t know it at the time it was also hugely significant because it was one of the last trips I made there before the news of ash dieback sank in. Dieback officially arrived in the UK in 2012. The pre-dawn main image of the ash saplings and the path is very poignant in retrospect. And the alternative image shows an ash tree in its full glory as the light started to get up.

These two pictures became the seed images for my second major project ‘Requiem for the Ash’ that has run from 2012 to 2026, narrating the impact of ash dieback on the wood.