Graham Smith (British, 1947). The Black Path, Clay Lane Furnaces, Derelict Remains of Cargo Fleet Iron Company, South Bank...

Description

Graham Smith (British, 1947)
The Black Path, Clay Lane Furnaces, Derelict Remains of Cargo Fleet Iron Company, South Bank, Middlesborough, 1982
Gelatin silver print, printed 2008. Signed, titled, dated and extensively inscribed in pencil, verso.
image: 11 x 13 inches (27.9 x 33.0 cm)
sheet: 15 x 17 inches

PROVENANCE:
Acquired directly from the artist.

This is one of a two photographs by Graham Smith in this sale. Smith, like his friend Chris Killip, who has a number of lots in the auction, created a series of photographs documenting the working class neighborhoods of his native north east of England during the turbulent 1970s and 1980s. Smith held a successful joint exhibition Another Country with Killip in London in 1985 (see previous lot for more details), which firmly established the reputations of both men. In 1991, they were both part of a group show at The Museum of Modern Art, New York (alongside John Davies, Paul Graham and Martin Parr) called, somewhat controversially,British Photography from the Thatcher Years. Following hostile backlash by some UK newspapers, which Smith felt adversely affected the individuals and communities he had photographed, he gave up photography to become a woodworker. His photographs only occasionally appear at auction.

On the back of each print, Smith usually provides us with a detailed description of the story behand the picture. Here he writes, "Outward bound or homecoming seamen off ships too big to navigate the River Tees used an ancient path known as the Sailors Trod. This footpath followed the riverbank at high tide and was bordered by open meadows shaped by every bend on a wide river. Those souls who worked land along the path must have lived with a belief that only on Doomsday would their life end. Then the heavy industry of iron making descended. Slag from the first furnace was tipped onto those quiet meadows, marshland, and tidal mud flats creating foundations on which to build another furnace and another, until there was a time when one man could not count all the furnaces along the River Tees in one day. The Sailors Trod soon became known as the Black Path. For more than a hundred and thirty years, workers from the many shipyards, foundries, docks and ironworks along its way used that footpath. Starting on the Middlesborough side of Cargo Fleet, the Black Path was a four mile experience of relentless noise echoing from vast steel sheet buildings, black smoke and, on rainy days, slimy soot, stench from sulphurous gas, iron coloured smoke heavy with metallic dust, white clouds of steam from red hot coke quenched under giant water towers, hissing pipe lines, lethal leaking valves, rattling rail lines, chimneys of fire and, from dusk until dawn, skies of fire. The Black Path was also used by children who handed their dads a tin pot of tea or bait through gaps in the fence. On Fridays, pay day, anxious wives met their men on the Black Path, collected wages, treasured and not long in the pocket, to put food on the table or pay overdue rent.

My dad, Albert Smith, was born in North Street alongside the Black Path, one of the first streets in South Bank, a small town built by Ironmasters to house the expanding workforce needed for their great new heavy industry of iron and steel. His first job was with the Cargo Fleet Iron Company as an apprentice fitter to his dad. Together they worked under the company's furnaces, repairing and maintaining large steam cranes. The rest of his working life was used up by industry along the path. His roots, and those of his father, grandfather and great grandfather are buried deep in the now derelict remains of the Cargo Fleet Iron Company. Like many other men, Albert Smith worked the Black Path for almost fifty years, then died."


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