The End of the Mine by Chris Upton
The last of our regular Special Presentation of 2021 was a hugely inspirational talk by Nottinghamshire based photographer Chris Upton. Chris is a landscape, travel and social documentary photographer and his presentation led us through all these areas and much, much more.
This was a walk through Chris' project documenting the last months of Thoresby Colliery in Nottinghamshire. What began as a simple project shooting a record of a mine, albeit not being allowed to go underground, bloomed into something much bigger and grew into an exhibition and a book, not to mention the AV and local radio and television.
This long journey was carefully, researched and choreographed by Chris including making meaningful relationships with the miners working on the site. The important point Chris was making was that a project, leading to a collection of photographs or even a book of pictures was a much better exercise that taking one photo to gain 10/10 from a judge!
The photographs that Chris showed us were wonderful examples of the art of black and white photography, because that’s what they were, he explained that If they had been in colour we would have all had our attention stuck on the orange workwear and missed the important vistas in the background.
All the pictures were shot in RAW, of course, converted into black and white and the postproduction was in Nik or Lightroom. And what wonderful results they were, Chris showed himself to be a consummate photographer and postproduction expert.
He summed up this project by emphasising the planning, constant re-evaluation, shoot lists and constant checks needed to take this to a satisfactory conclusion, assuring us that without all of these it would not have been possible. However he returned to his original theme that working on a project is much more satisfying than working on a single image only to get maximum marks from a judge.
Chris, thank you for an absolutely absorbing evening of photography and tips.
The images shown below were all included in the talk and are the copyright of Chris Upton.
