Disclosure

If anyone can claim to be the house photographer for the Manchester music scene since the 1970s, it is Kevin Cummins. Born in the shadow of Maine Road, Manchester City’s old ground, he began photographing Buzzcocks, The Fall and other bands of the city’s fledgling punk scene following the Sex Pistols’ 1976 gigs at the Lesser Free Trade Hall. And the next year, Cummins was on hand to document the Pistols’ final British gig, a benefit for striking firefighters and their children on Christmas Day in Huddersfield. But it was to be the music that emerged from Manchester in the wake of punk that brought his photographs to the wider audiences of the NME and The Face.

His images of Joy Division, New Order and The Smiths are some of the most well-known in rock photography and all of those artists feature in an exhibition of Cummins’ work currently running in St. Leonards-on-Sea. Disclosure is a retrospective, at the Lucy Bell Gallery in Norman Road, spanning his forty-year career. As well as images of later musicians from his home town, such as The Stone Roses and Oasis, there are portraits of David Bowie and Sinead O’Connor on show, and some of the last photographs of Richey Edwards of Manic Street Preachers.

The writer Paul Morley once said that he seemed to have been writing about Joy Division for most of his life; and it must be similar for Cummins as it his work with that band, and Ian Curtis in particular, that endures the most and will always ensure their names are inextricably linked: Curtis, cigarette in hand against the black walls of the bands’ rehearsal room; Curtis on stage, shirt untucking, arms raised in mid-dervish dance; Curtis, in the freezing cold, wearing the mac that launched a thousand rain-coated gloomsters (myself included) in tribute. But it is a photograph of the whole band that rivals Peter Saville’s artwork for their debut album as the most enduring Joy Division image.

The group had shown Saville an illustration, from the Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Astronomy, of the first pulsar discovered, CP 1919. The graphic, depicting the radio waves emitting from the collapsed star, was used in negative by Saville and centred in splendid isolation against an ocean of black, with no text. The sense of space on the cover was an uncanny reflection of the space within the music and it is immediately recognisable, without words, as a motif for the group. And Cummins’ photograph of the four band-members on a snow-covered footbridge in early 1979, achieves something similar. The dominance of the white space of sky and snow, the hidden blocks of Hulme and the symmetry of the railings pointing to the band – unposed, adrift and barely identifiable - all contribute to a beautiful image that captures perfectly the essence of their sound.

Disclosure is at Lucy Bell Fine Art, 46 Norman Road, St. Leonards-on-Sea, East Sussex, TN38 0EJ until 10th April 2015. Entrance free.

Gallery open Tuesday – Saturday 11am-4pm, Sunday 1-4pm.

Kevin Cummins is giving a talk at the gallery on Thursday 2nd April 7-9pm. Entrance £5, booking essential.

My Funny Valentine

Padding around the orchards of Greenways Fruit Farm yesterday, with Smithy the dog, I fell in love with a thing of rare beauty: it caught me completely by surprise and still seems inexplicable because I had passed the obscure object of my desire many times before without a flicker of emotion.

Perhaps because I had changed the direction of my usual walk from clockwise to counter, and came upon it from the opposite direction, sight of it from a different perspective made me truly see it for the first time.

Perhaps it was the power of the music I was listening to on my headphones - my soul already stirred - that accounted for the feeling that overwhelmed me. As I came up the hill I was listening to Tiger Man from British Sea Power’s atmospheric instrumental album, Man of Aran; at the very moment I turned the corner at the top and caught sight of it through the gap in the beech windbreaks, the track shuffled to the extraordinary Decades by Joy Division.

Joy Division’s music is the perfect snow music: this was cemented in my psyche early on by Kevin Cummins’ beautiful photograph from January 1979 of the band on a snow-covered footbridge. At the highest point of the bridge’s curve, the four are isolated in the bleached landscape, trapped by the symmetry of the railings and streetlights. This connection between Joy Division and snow was probably further compounded by the fact that it seemed to snow a lot in those winters at the end of the seventies and the start of the eighties when I was listening to their music; mind you, I have never really stopped listening to their music and there has been a lot of snow since, too.

So, perhaps the ethereal atmosphere of the snow and freezing fog had made me insubstantial and vulnerable and, when I suddenly found myself in its presence, its towering imposition overwhelmed me.

Whatever prompted it, there is no denying that I fell in love with an electricity pylon; pylon number 4VM 029 to be exact. I had never before considered the beauty of one of these structures but with its graceful, curving sweep from broad base to narrow pinnacle, its delicate latticed framework and its deific trio of pairs of crossarms, it struck me as both magnificent and tender. And its position on the fruit farm, near the top of the hill, shows it in all its glory.

All transmission towers, as pylons are called in the trade, are variations of an original design by Milliken Brothers, commissioned in 1928 by Sir Reginald Blomfield for the Central Electricity Board. The design has since been used all over the world. My pylon looks like an L6 D model but I stand to be corrected.

The American poet (Alfred) Joyce Kilmer wrote in 1913, “I think that I shall never see/ a poem lovely as a tree”. Spike Milligan reimagined these lines from the view of a cocked-legged dog; the people at the Pylon Appreciation Society would probably reimagine the tree as a pylon. For them, the poetry of a pylon is plain to see and they dedicate their efforts to helping the rest of us see their worth. For most however, I am sure the pylon is an eyesore, the forerunner of the dreaded wind turbine. Those who would have the countryside preserved in aspic can only see beauty in a sentimental construct of thatched roofs and tea rooms. The giants of the national grid, roped together as they march cross-country, are a stunning sight on the horizon or at close quarters; and you only have to drive across Romney Marsh and see the towers of Little Cheyne Court in the distance to be filled with awe by wind turbines, too.

Kilmer, incidentally, died in battle in northern France in 1918, by which time every tree had probably been blown to kingdom come. He never got to see the likes of 4VM 029; he would have loved them.