Peter Donnelly: Black Country Photographer & Poet – A Visual & Literary Journey | Now Available on Amazon

 

Pleased To announce "As If It Were Yesterday"

now Available on Amazon 

All captured on a Pentakon F 35mm Camera using Kodachrome and Agfa 35mm film. Decaying vistas, time-worn monuments, or simply sublime snapshots in time - this selection of imagery and verse is also history with a heart. This book also represents the love and respect between father and son, created by Simon Donnelly to honour his father’s plans after he passed away. The describing verses accompanying the pictures were added by Peter in his later years as he looked back in retrospect.

Print length
153 pages
Language
English
Publication date
1 Nov. 2019
Dimensions
21.59 x 0.91 x 21.59 cm

"As If It Were Yesterday"

now Available on Amazon

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Or This One for the Kindle Edition E Book

As If It Were Yesterday: Birmingham and The Black Country - Photographs From A Time Remembered Paperback And Kindle Ebooks

 

 




Location: Cradley, Malvern WR13, UK

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The Telegraph

Peter Donnelly's prize-winning essay offers a brilliant example of how local, and often unprepossessing, backgrounds can provide the material for an outstanding colour story. All his photographs were taken within a few miles of his home in Birmingham, Brierley Hill, at Blackheath, Bilston and Cradley Heath. He took them over a period of several months while on weekend walks along the deserted banks of the local canals. "Most evenings I never met a soul," Mr Donnelly recalls. "There was an air of isolation, and often desolation, over the whole scene, and this is what I have tried to capture in my photographs." The camera used was a Pentakon F and the film Agfa and Kodachrome.
by Dr Carl Chinn MBE
Peter Donnelly was born in Birmingham, educated at Corpus Christi junior school, Stechford and later at the holy rosary, Saltley. While at the Holy Rosary he took and passed a drawing examination for Moseley school of art at which he spent several years tuning his artistic talent.

On leaving the art school he joined Birmingham printers, Sam Currier & Son in brook street, St Pauls square, as an apprentice commercial artist. After completing his apprenticeship he left Sam Currier and worked at various printers and advertising agencies gaining valuable experience before starting with his working associate Bob Burns (typographer). Donnelly Burns Graphic Design studio was in Chapel Street, Lye before moving to larger premises in Cradley heath then Harborne.

Before starting the business Peter entered and won the Sunday Telegraph national photographic competition. He submitted an essay of photographs illustrating the demise of the Birmingham and Black Country canals with fellow photographer Norman Fletcher. To Peter and Norman, Midlands photographers and photographic societies seemingly had ignored the once great industrial arena that surrounded their everyday lives.

What an arena! what powerful exiting subjects for the camera; neglected canals, weed and web woven towpaths, old worn out narrow boats – redundant and half submerged in silted murky brown waters; steam trains rattling, hissing and bumping their waggons into line and the rail men who worked the line at that time.

Old foundries, run down factories and scrapyards – the industrial flotsam of a once great manufacturing region. Many six o’clock early morning starts were walked and many miles covered by Peter and his camera.

Now over 60 years later, photographs taken during those early excursions are being published - looking back at the time, long before the surge of change and reconstruction 1962 - 1965