Scenes of British industrial life spanning three centuries are on show in a new exhibition curated by University of Bolton lecturer Ian Beesley.



The internationally acclaimed artist and photographer has produced ‘Grafters:Industrial society in image and word’, for The People’s History Museum in Manchester.

Selected from important photographic archives across the North of England, the retrospective will run at the museum based in Spinningfields from 6 February until 14 August 2016.

Grafters depicts the role of industrial workers and how they change from objects to subjects; from figures to represent units of scale to the heroes of the photograph. Workers became the photographers themselves, directing and shooting pictures of their own lives, seen through their own lens.

To accompany the exhibition’s images writer, poet and broadcaster Ian McMillan has created a series of new poems giving a voice for the unknown people featured in the photographs as they go about their daily work.

‘I became aware that the majority of contemporary and historical photographs of industry I saw bore little or no resemblance to my experience of industry,’ said Ian who worked in a mill, a foundry and eventually a sewage works during the early 1970s.

‘Photography is a product of the industrial revolution, and so one would expect that photography would have a very close relationship with the representation of industrial society, unfortunately this does not seem to be the case.

‘Grafters is an attempt to understand the history and development of this troubled relationship, from its beginnings in the 1840s through to the present day.’

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