These images were made in Sheffield between 1988-90, The Lower Don Valley at that time an immense abandoned area of industrial history. The valley was mapped for change and ‘regeneration’ with retail and new sports facilities to house the World Student Games, but the lower Don Valley had been used for heavy industry for hundreds of years, and was renowned as the city producing steel and cutlery.
It’s difficult to describe the sheer size of the regeneration development and how much the industry had previously shaped the landscape. Everywhere had been altered in some way by the production of steel and heavy industry.
Documenting the change and the abandonment of place and purpose, during an era of re-structure of industrial collapse. It is the presence and traces that people bestow on the places they inhabit that I was drawn to. The cycle of destruction and re-use that drives the human condition.
Untitled Gallery was founded in 1979 by a group of Fine Art students from Sheffield Polytechnic, and was one of the first galleries in the country to be wholly dedicated to photography. It provided gallery, darkroom and education facilities in a small group of rented shops in Walkley, Sheffield, before relocating to larger premises in the city centre in 1988. In 1996 Untitled was renamed Site Gallery, and celebrated its 40th anniversary in 2019.
Throughout the 1980s Untitled commissioned and exhibited a series of photographers and artists to document and explore Sheffield at probably the most transformative stage in its history since the Industrial Revolution. Massive changes in the city's industrial and employment base were wrought by both national recession and government economic policies. The residents of the so-called ‘Socialist Republic of South Yorkshire’ suffered a severe impact on their quality of life, with the reduction of much of the capacity of the steel industry, the impact of the Miners' Strike and pit closures, and mass unemployment, all in the shadow of the fading Cold War.
However, the city was fighting hard to forge a new identity and future by securing the World Student Games, the creation of the Sheffield Development Corporation and the vast Meadowhall retail development. Sheffield was also one of the first cities in the UK to champion the development of the local Cultural Industries, of which Untitled Gallery was a part, buoyed by the ongoing success of its music industry with the Human League, Cabaret Voltaire, Fon Studios, Warp Records and others.
The eventual transformation of the lower Don Valley and the World Student Games sports facilities suggested a new future for the city, although in the minds of some it was laden with debt and self-doubt and took many years to realise its full and varying impact.
It was this turbulent decade that Untitled sought to explore, with no certain agenda except to invite artists and photographers to observe and report back. The key vehicle for this was The Sheffield Project, an artist-commissioning programme of new work that ran from 1987 to 1991, involving a series of young and emerging artists, recruited both locally and from across the UK.
More than thirty years later, by anybody’s reckoning Sheffield is transformed, and looking at images from the period it is sometimes hard to recall that city. This book is published to coincide with a new exhibition of the work at Weston Park, Sheffield. It not only features a selection of artists and photographers involved in The Sheffield Project, but also includes other work from the period curated by Untitled Gallery, including John Davies’ pivotal Sheffield Landscapes and Bill Stephenson’s Hyde Park portraits Streets in the Sky, amongst others. This selection draws together for the first time a broader collection of photography that charts Untitled Gallery’s involvement in producing new work concerning the city, and provides a wider record of Sheffield during that decade of immense change and new hope.
This reappraisal of the work also provides an opportunity to examine the period in terms of the development of fine art and documentary photography in the UK. All the work was produced in the pre-digital age when new colour processes and documentary and fine art practices merged to create a distinctly British (as distinct from American) aesthetic and direction. This was largely fuelled by the new fine art and photography degree courses of the time in cities such as Nottingham, Newport, Derby and Sheffield.
Matthew Conduit, Curator, September 2020
The publication below was curated by Matthew Conduit and was published to coincide with the The Sheffield Project: Photographs of a Changing City
Fri 23 October 2020 - Sun 28 November 2021 WESTON PARK MUSEUM Sheffield. and can be purchased through the Untitled Print Studio. click on the image.
The Sheffield Project: Photographs of a Changing City features work by Mike Black, Matthew Conduit, Berris Conolly, John Darwell, John Davies, Anna Fox, Graham Gaunt, John Kippin, Kate Mellor, Ken Phillip, Tim Smith, Bill Stephenson, Ian Stewart, Patrick Sutherland and Adrian Wynn.