Between 1988 and 1992, Berris Conolly photographed the Lower Don Valley, the industrial heartland of Sheffield, as its cleared brownfield sites and half-demolished works gave way to a landscape few photographers thought to record at all. He came to the commission with unusual preparation: after leaving commercial photography in 1984, he had spent several years documenting Hackney with a medium format camera, learning how to hold a place still while it changed around him. He moved from London to Sheffield at the end of 1988 and has remained there since.
The commission belonged to the Sheffield Project, launched by Untitled Gallery under the title ‘Regeneration’ and sustained across three years through several photographic commissions tracking the city’s upheavals. Conolly was among the first photographers appointed; his own brief was narrower and more difficult than the project’s broad theme, and the book is the measure of what he made of it. The project’s 1991 exhibition, timed to the World Student Games and spread across several galleries in the city, showed the commissioned work together. A retrospective is scheduled at Weston Park Museum, returning this material to public view.
What distinguishes the book is its discipline. The sixty-two duotone plates, printed in a clothbound volume of 104 pages at 240 by 300 millimetres, hold to a stripped industrial register; the sequence reads as a patient reckoning with demolition rather than a survey of decline, and the interval between exposure and publication gives the pictures a weight the original commission could not have anticipated. Conolly’s later work, including ‘One Mile’, made only within a mile of his home, shows the same willingness to stay put and look again.
For collectors of British documentary photography, the book offers a sustained record of a specific urban transformation by a photographer whose commitment to place outs lasted any single assignment. Readers already familiar with his Hackney Photographs 1985-1987 will find here a companion in method and temperament, and a body of work whose retrospective moment is close at hand.
