Colin Gifford - Early Years

Early Years

Gifford is a Londoner, from Islington, though he later moved to Crawley in Sussex where his family held a catering concession at what was to become Gatwick Airport. As a child he had no particular interest in railways – though he lived within walking distance of Kings Cross station, he was never a locospotter. Instead, he would hover around the ticket barriers, fascinated by the ebb and flow of travellers and the bustle of station business as much as by the trains themselves. It was not until his student days in the late 1950s at Harrow School of Art that he found tangible expression for the visual possibilities that railways offered him. Though he was far more interested in illustration than in photography, he began taking shots of railway scenes around North London and especially along the ex-Great Central main line that passed through Harrow, gradually moving further afield as his new-found enthusiasm for railway photography began to take hold. The branch lines around his Sussex home were another fruitful hunting ground.

After college Gifford worked as a graphic designer in the West End advertising industry, often using his weekends and holidays to travel the country – by public transport wherever possible – to photograph railways. He preferred steam subjects, but unlike most contemporary photographers always took plenty of shots of diesel and electric traction.

Although Bill Brandt is often cited as a major influence, the style that made Gifford's name clearly owed much to the work of a man who is virtually unknown to British enthusiasts – the pioneering Swiss avant-garde railway photographer Jean-Michel Hartmann, whose book Magie du Rail (Editions Amart, 1959) revealed an eye for pattern and form that had a massive impact on Gifford's pictorial approach. Other than Hartmann, Gifford was always cagey about naming which, if any, railway photographers he particularly admired. O Winston Link was dismissed as 'too contrived' and 'pantomime' and he had even less time for the cosy coterie of British cameramen whose work – conventional in the extreme, obsessed with locomotives and of interest only to other enthusiasts – dominated the magazines of the 1950s and early 1960s. Gifford preferred to record things honestly and naturalistically, as he found them, much as the great Picture Post photojournalists had done. He firmly believed this was a way of making railway photography accessible to a far wider audience, although it would be many years before his approach was fully vindicated.