A new black and white photographic exhibition at Manchester’s People’s History Museum looks back at the bygone world in Eccles less than forty years ago.About Manchester spoke to the photographer Martin O’Neill.
When a thirteen year old Martin decided to join his school camera club back in the 1970’s, he begged and pleaded even though so far he had shown no interest in photos or camera.
Two years later he was its only member, spending hours in the dark room and sowing the seed for a career behind the lens, working for local newspapers and capturing images of people.
His images from that period capture an Eccles that has long gone and a profession that has changed. Then he would steel himself to ask people whether they wished to be photographed. Often he would have to ask the to move out of shot for they were in the way of a building that he wanted to capture.
Those scenes of Eccles ‘Outdoor’ Market on a Saturday morning, now the site of a supermarket,The chip shop, the diesel-engine factory, will never return. The characters, the friendships, the memories all gone as he grew up as a working class lad in the town.
In all there are over one hundred image from that period of the late 1970’s on show at the Community Gallery.
You can see more of Martin’s work HERE
What has changed,mays Martin, is that people are suspicious of the camera.He went back to the area two years ago and was told to stop waving his camera around.
As he writes:
I suppose that nowadays the work place is more likely to be a sterile call centre, the Big Shop is done with the click of a mouse online and playing with your mates generally involves an internet connection and a very expensive computer game. Funny thing, though. One day these will be the ‘good old days’ for a lot of people, and though my ‘good old days’ have gone.. the pictures carry on!!’
Made in Eccles An exhibition of black and white photographs from a working class Eccles lad in the 1970s and 1980s, Martin O’Neill
24 January 2015 — 19 April 2015 People’s History Museum
