Mark Lawrence
I’ve been interested in railways for as long as I can remember and, apparently, it’s all the responsibility of my late grandmother, Sadie Griffin, a Scot. Still in my pram I was taken to see trains on the LT&S at Leigh on Sea and soon I was asking for “just one more”. Some 60 years later my wife, Lorna, will tell you little has changed!
Like many I started spotting and filling my Ian Allan books, by this point living in the relatively loco free zone otherwise known as the South Eastern Division of the Southern Region. Reading railway magazines like Modern Railways I was inspired to start photographing the trains that I loved – images from the likes of John Cooper Smith, Les Nixon and others fuelled my growing passion.
At the age of 13 funds from a paper round allowed the purchase of a Praktica LTL3 and 50mm lens. Using Ilford FP4 film and armed with far more enthusiasm than knowledge my photographic journey began.
With a school darkroom I was able to start developing my own film and making a few prints, the magic of watching an image emerge in the developing tray was wonderful, even if the quality of the results left a lot of room for improvement!
Age did a little to improve my skills and spending three fantastic years at Newcastle University expanded my geographic horizons and made “day” trips to the West Highland Line a possibility. With the benefit of hindsight, I should have made more effort to photograph the everyday scenes in the industrial northeast which were soon to be swept away.
I was however somewhat distracted by 37 bashing and the rugged beauty of the Highlands, perhaps thanks to my Scottish roots, this area became the subject of many visits over subsequent years.
A 40-year career in Logistics followed university and I have been fortunate to be involved in or lead a number of fascinating (to me!) operations, although sadly never involving rail transport. The closest I came was running a transport depot in the old railway goods yard at Shalford, just outside Guildford which provided many photographic opportunities of the 33’s that plied the North Downs line with engineer’s traffic.
During this time, I published a book on Network Southeast and when my then boss asked for a copy I happily obliged, writing “see if you can work out how many of these pictures where taken whilst I was working for you!” My Logistics career also provided plenty of opportunity for travel, mainly in the UK, and I always made sure I had a camera by my side just in case I could sneak some time by the lineside.
Despite living near London on the Chiltern Line, my love of Scotland has been a constant and, having started the transition from black and white film to digital in 2007, I was again able to print images (the darkroom having been declared not compatible with family life).
This subjected my long-suffering wife to the trauma of being shown prints of 37’s in Scotland and it was on one of these occasions that she made the profound observation that “it’s a lovely landscape, what a shame there is a train in it!” Perhaps as some sort of revenge or perhaps in an attempt to break the habit of a lifetime Lorna booked me on a landscape photography workshop in a part of Scotland where there are no railway lines.
As is often said, timing is everything, and so it was that with less of interest on the railways of Scotland the course sparked a new direction in my photography and maybe even my life. The rest, as they say, is history! I now teach landscape photography, write for photography magazines and run tours in the UK and overseas. Naturally I’m still photographing trains and apply some of my learning from the world of landscape photography to my railway photography. It is not to everyone’s taste, but photography is a personal thing, and I believe that first and foremost we should photograph what we love, in the way that we want to express ourselves. Being a member of 1Z10 provides a great opportunity to meet up with like-minded enthusiasts, share images, gain inspiration and best of all, just have some fun.
