Colin Gifford - Working For Ian Allan

Working For Ian Allan

In the early 1960s Gifford joined the publishing house of Ian Allan as art editor and began slipping the occasional railway photograph into the magazines he designed. He took many of his most famous shots – including some stunning images of Bulleid pacifics at speed, captured from trains on adjacent lines – during the course of his daily commute; thirty years later, one of these images would be featured on a Royal Mail stamp. At Shepperton he restyled many familiar publications, such as the Combined Volume (the Winter 1962-3 edition is now a design classic, with its yellow cover featuring a green 4-CEP emu) and the expanding Ian Allan magazine stable. He was instrumental in reshaping and reinvogorating the austerely academic Railway World and helping transform the enthusiast-focused Trains Illustrated into Modern Railways, a quality large-format monthly for transport professionals that was driven by a strong visual dynamic. In a branch of publishing that was increasingly falling prey to nostalgia, Gifford's imaginative photographs of the current scene brought excitement and a breath of fresh air – the 'new' Euston was a particular favourite in Modern Railways. Many Ian Allan pictorial albums from this period benefited from his visual flair and creative design. There were even some elaborately contrived trompe l'oeil covers for Model Railway Constructor, including a speeding Trix 'Warship' and a 00 gauge BR Standard Class 9F seemingly emitting an enormous plume of smoke.

Away from the Ian Allan design studio, Gifford continued to build a photographic record of every region of British Railways using a Rolleiflex medium-format twin-lens reflex camera. He was also busily photographing the full length of the River Thames with the idea of one day making a book out of it. His work was predominantly black and white and for 35mm colour work he used cheaper, less sophisticated cameras such as the Russian-made Fed; in later years a Pentax SLR joined the faithful Rolleiflex TLR.

All this creativity came together with the publication in 1965 of Decline of Steam. Its effect on British railway photography was nothing short of cataclysmic – certainly to an audience that, for the most part, had never seen the work of Jean-Michel Hartmann. In place of endless front three-quarter views (with the sun always coming over the photographer's shoulder and the locomotive number clearly visible) here were misty industrial landscapes, sweating railway workers, rainswept nocturnal platforms, sulphurous engine sheds. The trains themselves were often almost an afterthought in this vision of the railway as a totality; some images did not feature trains at all. The design and layout of the pictures (by Gifford himself) was at least as important as the subject.

All over Britain, Gifford was either hailed as the new Messiah or reviled by the old guard (who could never quite articulate why they were so uneasy with his work - contemptuously describing a photograph as 'an out of focus blur passing some grainy cooling towers' was about the limit of their critical evaluation). Soon popular magazines such as Railway World and Railway Magazine were offering an uncomfortable mixture of Gifford-inspired avant-garde (or what passed as avant-garde) and the traditional. By 1967, however, Gifford had left Ian Allan and devoted himself to photographing the final years of British steam virtually full-time, often in the company of his young protégé Ian Krause, another product of Harrow School of Art (it was Krause, rather than Gifford, who was behind the 'New Approach' photographic feature that first appeared in Railway World in 1966 and continued after Gifford's departure). This association introduced Gifford to the infamous MNA (Master Neverer's Association), a group of (mostly) Midlands-based photographers centred on the legendary Paul Riley, an ex-roadie and professional hellraiser. The endless overnight car journeys and inevitable ego clashes were not to Gifford's taste – he is a soft-spoken and unassuming man – and he returned to public transport and his own company for the final months of steam. He never did own a telephoto lens in steam days, although it became the hallmark of the Gifford-inspired 'New Approach' to railway photography that had featured in Railway World and reached its apotheosis in the Ian Allan album Steam Portfolio (1968). Style sometimes triumphed over substance but in the work of young photographers such as Malcolm Dunnett and Roderick Hoyle, Gifford's influence was unmistakable; in the book's static page layout, however, the absence of his subtle design skills was all too obvious.