ST LEONARDS ON SEA.- The 1970s & 80s were dynamic times for the photographic industry. London was alive with motorbike couriers darting through the streets, delivering film canisters to darkrooms and labs where they were processed through the night. By morning, the images, in the form of contact sheets, were in the hands of newspapers and clients. These darkrooms weren't just workspaces, they were social hubs where photographers met and networked. Some darkrooms held parties for their clients, models, celebrities and photographers and some even had their own football or darts teams.

Robin Bell’s darkroom, located at Chelsea Wharf on Lots Road, was also a hub of activity within this vibrant scene. Known for his exceptional quality, Bell attracted big names like David Bailey, Terry O’Neill, Sheila Rock, Linda McCartney, Snowdon and Donovan. Bailey declared him a master, and Donovan said “Robin Bell is the only person to trust your negatives to”.

Fast forward 50 years, and the photographic landscape has dramatically changed. The era of film canisters and couriers has given way to digital files that arrive instantly to clients' and art directors' inboxes. The darkroom’s familiar smells of developer and fixer have been succeeded by the sterile world of digital screens; many processes once done by hand in the darkroom are now automated and often impersonal.

But Robin Bell has remained true to his art. For five decades, he has held onto his reputation as one of the world's best darkroom printers. As Bell himself says, “I’m stubbornly analogue. Silver has depth, almost a third dimension, proven archival properties and the prints are by their nature almost unique events. It’s always been the thing I like doing the most and I’ve just stuck it out through all the ups and downs and existential threats that have been fired in every darkrooms’ direction.”

Despite the industry's digital shift, Bell’s skills have always been in demand. His prints feature in the collections of The National Portrait Gallery, The Tate, Whitechapel Gallery, Royal Photographic Society, and The Photographers’ Gallery. Over the years, his eye for printing has been employed by photographers including Bill Brandt, Ernst Haas, Don McCullin, Tom Stoddart, Marilyn Stafford, James Ravilious, Carinthia West, Pattie Boyd, Kevin Cummins, Raul Canibano and Ian Berry, many of whom featured in Bell’s original exhibition and accompanying book The Silver Footprint, published in 2010 to celebrate the 35 year anniversary of establishing his solo darkroom.

As photographers, galleries, and collectors revisit the roots of the photographic industry, Robin Bell’s dedication to traditional darkroom techniques continues to shine. This exhibition celebrates his 50th year in the darkroom, and includes series by Ernst Haas, James Ravilious, Tom Stoddart, Olivia Rose, Elin Hoyland, Fergus Greer, Bill Brandt, Ian Berry, Brian Aris, Timothy Part, Ken Russell, Roger Chapman, Martyn Colbeck as well as unseen work of the mysterious ‘Mr C’, a photographer shooting in the streets of Boston, USA during the 1950s, whose stunning archive has just been discovered and printed for the first time by Robin. Many more photographers feature.

More about the featured photographers:

BILL BRANDT: (1904 – 1983)  was a British photographer and photojournalist. Born in Germany, Brandt moved to England where he became known for his images of upstairs/downstairs British society for such magazines as Lilliput and Picture Post; later he made distorted nudes, portraits of famous artists, and landscapes. He is widely considered to be one of the most influential British photographers of the last century.

ERNST HAAS: (1921 – 1986) is one of the most acclaimed photographers of 20th century America, and is considered a pioneer of colour photography. Born in 1921 in Vienna, Haas took up photography after the war, his early work on Austrian returning prisoners of war ‘The Homecoming’, was published in Life in 1949. This series of work was seen by Robert Capa, which led to him inviting Haas to Paris to join the international photographic cooperative Magnum, then only two years old. Haas became close associates with Magnum’s early members- Henri Cartier-Bresson, George Rodger, David “Chim” Seymour and Werner Bischof; in 1950 Robert Capa appointed Haas as Magnum's U.S. Vice President.

Although Haas is renowned for his colour photography, his black and white images are among the most incisive, evocative, and beautiful images of post-war Europe and America. He also worked as a stills photographer on films such as The Misfits, The Pharaoh, Little Big Man and West Side Story.

IAN BERRY: (born 1934) is a British photojournalist with Magnum Photos. He made his reputation in South Africa, where he worked for the Daily Mail and later for Drum magazine. He was the only photographer to document the massacre at Sharpeville in 1960, and his photographs were used in the trial to prove the victims' innocence. Ian Berry was also invited by Henri Cartier-Bresson to join Magnum Photos in 1962.

Berry has since travelled the globe, documenting social and political strife in China, The Republic of Congo, Czechoslovakia, Ethiopia, Israel, Ireland, Vietnam and the former Soviet Union. After a decade of travelling and living in Africa and then Paris, Ian Berry conceived ‘The English’, a project that would enable him to both document and rediscover the country in which he was born and grew up. “It seemed like a good idea to do something on the English before my eyes got too jaded.”

Having returned to London in the mid-sixties, he received a commission from the Whitechapel Gallery in 1972 to photograph the local area of the East End, and was later awarded the first ever Arts Council Photography Bursary which gave Berry the opportunity to extend his exploration of everyday life to the whole of England. Travelling across the country for the best part of 1975, he photographed people old and young, of all classes, at home, at work, at leisure, together and alone. ‘The English’ was published as a book in 1978. The exhibition includes 4 of these prints.

ROGER CHAPMAN: is an award-winning cinematographer, whose portfolio includes films about the Buddhist Kung Fu monks of the Shaolin Temple, war-torn Bosnia, drug gangs in Rio de Janeiro, the sacred river Ganges, and the secretive world of Geisha in Kyoto. Camel: A Journey through Fragile Landscapes is his first major international photographic project, shot on 2¼ inch square format black and white film. He used a 1970s Hasselblad camera while on location in India, Mongolia, Sudan and the United Arab Emirates between 2011 and 2014.

OLIVIA ROSE: (born 1985) is a British portrait photographer and music video director, living in London. Rose was born and grew up in Northwest London. She has made portraits of contemporary UK musicians and shot fashion editorials, and her work is held in the National Portrait Gallery Collection. One of her most famous series, This Is Grime, was published by London Hodder and Stoughton in 2016. Featuring in the exhibition are portraits, and recent experimental prints onto glass, made in direct collaboration with Robin.

JAMES RAVILIOUS: (1939 - 1999) trained as an artist like his father Eric Ravilious, but a visit to a Cartier-Bresson exhibition converted him to photography. In 1972 he moved to an unspoilt part of North Devon with his wife Robin, and began recording daily life in the traditional part of England before it became modernised. For 17 years he uniquely recorded the way of life in this small piece of the countryside, including landscapes and the people, their hardships and pleasures. The 75,000 negatives that are now housed at the Beaford Archive are a respected and unique body of work, unparalleled, at least in this country, for its scale and quality. Six prints from this time capsule are included in the exhibition.

ELIN HOYLAND: is a Norwegian photographer based in Oslo. Elin befriended two hermit-like elderly brothers, and documented their lives over many years in their small hamlet in rural Norway. Harald and Mathias Ramen lived together seemingly all their lives, happily isolated from much of the rest of the world, enjoying nature and each other’s quiet company.

LEE TRACY: Almost nothing is known about Lee Tracy and it's even possible that this is a pseudonym. These pictures of scenes from the Sunset club on Carnaby street in the early 50s feature a rare glimpse into the culture of the Windrush generation. The images belong to Topfoto Archive, who commissioned the featured prints from Robin in 2020. They have since been acquired by Autograph ABP in London for their permanent collection, and have been exhibited in the Changing the Story Exhibition at North Wall, Oxford. The Sunset Club was a meeting place for many to appreciate and enjoy jazz and calypso music, where music was played until 7am.

TOM STODDART: (1953 – 2021) was a hugely respected British photojournalist, who covered stories such as the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Lebanese Civil War, the Siege of Sarajevo, and the Invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Tom's career as a photojournalist was outstanding, and while always in pursuit of the elusive photograph to capture the moment and make a front page, he would later use the proceeds from highly paid advertising assignments to work for free for humanitarian organisations highlighting their campaigns usually involving children. Tom worked closely with charities and NGO's including Médecins Sans Frontieres, Oxfam, Christian Aid, Care International and Sightsavers.

Tom preferred to work in black and white, quoting the Canadian photographer Ted Grant: “When you photograph people in colour, you photograph their clothes. But when you photograph people in black and white, you photograph their souls!”

His retrospective outdoor exhibition, iWITNESS, was visited by 250,000 people and the accompanying book was honoured as the best photography book published in 2004 by the POY judging panel.

KEN RUSSELL: (1927 - 2011) directed some of the most provocative and memorable films in British cinema, including Women in Love, The Music Lovers, Tommy, and Altered States. Lesser known is his earlier working life as a freelance photographer, from 1954 to 1957, after giving up on his career as a ballet dancer. Russell’s “cinematic eye” is in early evidence in his photographic work, illustrated in his series of Portobello, and London Street scenes and sketches.

His photographic archive would not have existed had it not been for Alan Smith, the owner of Topfoto, who unearthed the negatives in 2005 and took them to Ken Russell for authentication, and soon after to Robin Bell to print. A few months later, Russell’s house burned to the ground, most of his original scripts and research were destroyed, but the negatives remained at Topfoto, so this part of his archive was saved.

BRIAN ARIS: started as a photojournalist during the 1960s-1970s. His work for a London Agency took him on a series of frontline assignments around the world - covering civil unrest and riots at the start of The Troubles in Northern Ireland, the plight of Palestinian children in Jordan, the Civil War in Lebanon, famine in Africa and the war in Vietnam, where he worked until the final days of the conflict in Saigon.

“I was really disillusioned when I returned from Vietnam in 1975. I managed to get my films back to the agencies quickly but they were soon returned saying interest in the war was over.”

Aris changed direction and opened a studio in London where he started photographing fashion for newspapers and magazines, regularly flying to exotic locations such as St. Tropez and Jamaica for weeks at a time to work with a succession of top models. At the same time he gradually broadened his studio work to include pop and rock including The Jam, The Clash, The Boomtown Rats, Roxy Music and The Police and eventually turned away from the model world to concentrate on the music industry which was exploding in Britain.

MARTYN COLBECK: is an award-winning filmmaker and photographer, who has been filming wildlife worldwide for more than 30 years, working mainly in association with the BBC’s world-renowned Natural History Unit in Bristol. Martyn has filmed many sequences for BBC landmark series including ‘The Trials of Life’, ‘The Life of Mammals’, ‘Planet Earth’ and more recently ‘Nature’s Great Events’. He has also made award-winning films on a variety of animals including orangutans, gelada baboons, pygmy chimpanzees, and desert elephants.

Martyn has won Best Cinematography awards at the two most prestigious wildlife film festivals of the world, - the Jackson Hole Wildlife Film Festival, for his film ‘Wild Africa Mountains’ and the Wildscreen International and Environmental Film Festival for his film ‘Elephants of the Sand River’. In addition to these awards Martyn won an Emmy as part of the camera team on the BBC series “Planet Earth”.

Martyn is well known for his work with African elephants. Of the five award-winning elephant films he has made, three have been in association with Cynthia Moss of the Amboseli Trust for Elephants in Kenya. Together they have uniquely chronicled the life of a matriarch known as Echo and her family over a period of 15 years. Four of these images will be included in the exhibition.

The exhibition previews on the 28th of September from 6 - 8 pm.