Liverpool – ” Seaport – A place Apart” is Leigh Preston’s limited edition new book, a meandering, autographed narrative, peppered with dozens of images through a period of fifty years.
‘Liverpool – a city regarded as defiantly untamed, Northern, standing apart, her back towards the rest of England, facing resolutely westwards. A seaport, threaded together by aeons of change along the broad drift of the Mersey – the boundary river, a metaphorical mile wide fault line dividing the tectonic plates of Lancashire and Cheshire.’
‘This is a city woven together by past wealth, imperialism and empire since its founding in 1207, fastened by a unique voice with an evocative and rather disparate legacy. Known for commerce, for myth and fable and individuality. Architecturally its significance is second only to the capital. A composite and complex work of art in new gloss and old matt finishes. Recognised for a contemplative inwardness, cussed, often it’s ‘ the accused’. Outsiders wrongly regard Liverpool as self-serving, with a built in air of grievance, caught too often by tragedy. Spotlit for all the wrong reasons – poverty, unemployment, criminal traits, crystallised regret, ingrained dirt, and a defiant socialist stance. In reality, this was a broad shouldered and bustling port, massive in scale, frequently brooding under a cast-iron sky, a tone poem in photographic charcoal. This wounded and conflicted fiercely urban document is the place where Lennon met McCartney, renowned for its addiction to football, for ‘Liverpudlian’ wit and aphorism. It has made more music than most cities, it can show off, be self reliant, and depend on mordant humour in a metallic accent to get through when times are tough. There’s plenty to be proud of here – Three Graces, Two Cathedrals, a whole raft of Museums, Georgian Town houses, and the recent epic transformation to modernise its fractured and broken past. Liverpool – A remarkable, utterly distinctive city perched on a lofty Sandstone pedestal above the wide silver ribbon of the Mersey and line of the docks, watched over by the mythical Liver Birds, with the smudged outline of the Wirral and Birkenhead beyond. This vast, resilient, and arcane city is constantly spiralling from today’s immediacy to those archaic and elusive ghosts from somewhere deep in its history.
This book is a meandering, autographed narrative, peppered with dozens of images accumulated through a period of fifty years. The photographs are percussive fragments of detail and admiration, a realistic portrait, spliced into what is part tribute, part affection. The words are a randomly typed soundtrack of scattered recollection, utterly subjective and as restless as progress. In the late 1960’s I saw a ruined Imperial city, tainted in achromatic black, enveloped in the industrial cloak of the early twentieth century. Liverpool looked solemn, faded and tired, with its crumbling buildings, a tortured urban plain and its near abandoned river. So utterly photogenic.
I concentrated on immersive atmospheric images in a dense unsettling monochrome. Photographically the old era, that once timeless edge of the city is far harder to discern within its torn pages of echoing stone, but the modern bright, optimistically recreated Liverpool offers masses of photographic opportunity and gave this project a proper sense of balance.’
Liverpool – ” Seaport – A place Apart” is illustrated with 200 images and a conversational script. Copies are available directly from Leigh. Contact him on 01452 612871 or lcl.preston@blueyonder.co.uk, if you are interested.
