Articles in the press last week about Don McCullin’s new film found me rummaging through his autobiography ‘Unreasonable Behaviour’ and pondering on the look and feel of the images he is renowned for – Black & White  Vietnam war and others. The report on his recent and possibly last war reporting  in Aleppo showed an altogether different look and feel. Whether that was due to the reportage being primarily an urban theatre, although there was plenty of that in Vietnam, or down to the fact that these were digital colour as opposed to gritty and grainy Black & White is anyone’s guess. I suppose, and this is just from an aesthetic perspective, the Black & White wins it for me. Rather fitting then that he was shown in Black & White on the front cover of the supplement.

Anyway, his retrospective fired me up into looking back into my own rather diminutive archive. 40 years ago this year, I had high hopes of trotting off to University to study for a degree in Photography. A portfolio was a must and although the prints have long gone following a period of damp storage, the negatives remained safe and sound.

http://tomowens.openpoint.co.uk/galleries/landscapes/liverpool/

These images were part of my portfolio and were at the time subject to quite intense debate at the interviews owing to quality. My film in these days was FP4 bought in 100m rolls and loaded my own cassettes. There was a classic case of user error on my part and I did not operate my Watson bulk film loader properly and consequently scratched several kilometres of film before I  realised what was wrong. The problem I had was that within 24 hours of  2 of these shots the subject no longer existed. Despite the apparent ruination I could not part with the negatives. I was not to know then that one of the advantages of the digital age would be be the ability to de-scratch these negatives.

I wonder whether I would be able to record images like these days? I doubt it, but now that I am actually at University studying  for that elusive degree from 40 years ago, maybe a touch of social and civil anthropology is on the cards?