Colin Gifford - Each A Glimpse . . . and Gone Forever

Each A Glimpse . . . and Gone Forever

The best of Gifford's prodigious output from these years found a place in Each a Glimpse, his second masterpiece, published by Ian Allan in 1970 and once again designed by Gifford himself; it sold for an unbelievable four guineas, a fair proportion of which was absorbed by the laminated plastic dustjacket. Many of the pictures dated from 1967-8 and the influence of Jean-Michel Hartmann – almost overwhelming in Decline of Steam – was far less marked in a book that showed how, in those final years of steam, Gifford had begun to experiment with new techniques (possibly stimulated by his association with David Percival and other young photographers) and find his own visual language, less graphically dynamic and more pictorialist than before. Forty years on, those photographs of a long-vanished Britain have the poignancy and social relevance of films such as Billy Liar, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning or This Sporting Life. Their value is enhanced by the fact that very few Gifford photographs have ever been published twice – he was always careful to keep his work fresh and unlike most of his contemporaries, never allowed publishers to hang on to his photographs on the off-chance they might be used one day. He was (and continues to be) reluctant to allow his work to be published unless he has designed the page layouts himself.

Although he had amassed a collection of some 18,000 negatives between 1958 and 1968, with enough unpublished material (including his rarely-glimpsed colour work) for many more books, Gifford's understandable fastidiousness about his work became something of a stumbling block. The Thames book failed to find a publisher, while sales of Steam Railways in Industry (Batsford, 1976) were disappointing, as was the reproduction quality. A projected seven-part region-by-region study with Ian Allan ground to a halt after just one volume, Steam Finale North (also 1976), had been published and Gifford was not best pleased when Ian Allan subsequently brought out Steam Finale Scotland, superficially a continuation of the series but in practice containing nothing by Gifford. Things had looked far more promising when, the previous year, Gifford had signed with New English Library (an American-owned company) to produce the companion-piece to Each a Glimpse, entitled And Gone Forever. With an eye on the export market and foreign co-editions, extensive use of colour was stipulated for the first time. A mock-up of And Gone Forever was presented at the 1976 Frankfurt Book Fair but the book was never, alas, to reach production, at least in the form Gifford and his publisher anticipated; deadlines came and went and though most of the design work was eventually completed, the contract was terminated in 1978 - a very different book of the same title finally appeared from Oxford Publishing Company in 1994, but without the colour photographs that had been promised 18 years earlier.

In that same year, Royal Mail published a set of five postage stamps featuring a selection of his photographs, chosen in collaboration with the designer Brian Delaney; as with all Royal Mail stamp isues, the designs were personally approved by the Queen. There was an exhibition at the National Postal Museum to mark the event, which included items such as Gifford's notebooks and treasured Rolleiflex camera. Gifford had by then moved to Hertfordshire – and learned to drive – but for the next decade and a half little was seen of his work, other than occasional magazine articles and the odd small exhibition.