Not so black and white.

Kate Feld ponders the old North-South divide (and a few stereotypes) in a new photography exhibition at Gallery Oldham

Whippets. Ferrets. Pigeon-racing. Dour coalminers and flat-capped factory workers clutching pints of bitter. Women pegging out washing in bricked-in back yards. Lines of bleak terraced houses marching up the hills, and presiding over it all, always, the mill. Bradford-born photographer Ian Beesley is familiar with all the classic Northern stereotypes.

Over the course of his career, Beesley has wondered whether Northern photographers represent the region differently than outsiders. Do people from outside the North produce work that ends up reflecting the famously grim land of their imagination? These questions form the basis of Gallery Oldham’s current photography exhibition, North South Divide, which Beesley curated.

He spent months scouring photo archives and looking at the work of social documentary photographers from far and wide. But Beesley says he didn’t find the trove of images of squalor and deprivation he was expecting. He didn’t get any easy answers to the question he had posed for himself, either. One one hand, he says, ‘we’re living in a London-centric country, and the media reflects that. People do come here with preconceived ideas.’ On the other hand, it’s not that simple. On reflection, Beesley says, you can’t really examine the work of individual photographers without taking into consideration the influence of curators, archivists, photo editors, and even the commercial photography market.

‘When it comes to professional photography we follow or are seduced into particular ways of representing a place because of the financial value of the images. You actually see less of the stereotypes in depictions of people, it’s more in the environment,’ he says. ‘People still look for the cobbles, the broken windows, the mill chimney.’

For the past 30 years, his own top seller has been a Bill Brandt-style picture of a black mill with shiny cobblestones, and Beesley has always wondered why it’s so popular. ‘I put it down to topophilia; love of place. People develop this affection for their built environment even though it may not be physically beautiful, even though it may be tied up in memories that are unpleasant.’

In the course of his research, Beesley also come to question how much of so-called Northern photography can really be considered indigenous. ‘The only time you get truly indigenous photography is when you have people like Jack Hulme or Jimmy Forsythe, very talented primitive photographers who photographed the communities they lived in for 60-70 years, as part of the community,’ he says.

But whether the exhibition answers all of these thorny questions or not, it certainly provides a good excuse to assemble an enticing selection of images from 23 photographers including Brandt, Martin Parr, Tony Ray Jones, John Davies and Shirley Baker. Northerners and outsiders alike, stereotypes or not, each one has their own personal take on the people and landscapes of the North.

North South Divide, Gallery Oldham. Until 5 Sept. Free entry. Images: both Ian Beesley

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