Northern souls

Two years after a major retrospective that was intended to be his swansong, Ian Beesley is back with a new exhibition for the fans who still want more.

- Peter Dench

From August to October 2022, around 38,000 visitors climbed four flights of stone steps at Salts Mill to see the exhibition Life: A Retrospective by Bradford born social documentary photographer Ian Beesley. It’s not bad for a lad who was invited to leave school for an accumulation of misdemeanours. Those misdemeanours included a visionary prank putting potassium permanganate crystals in the gusset of the school swimming captain at a gala so that when he dived in, the swimming pool, along with his private parts, turned bright purple. The headmaster advised Master Beesley to pursue a career more suitable to a boy of meagre talents.

After Life, which was supposed to be his segue into retirement, Ian continued to receive emails and messages about the exhibition, asking what and who else might be contained deep in a photo archive that contains over 200,000 images.

‘We thought it was a good opportunity to put in the stuff that people had asked about that we hadn’t exhibited, plus other things that I’ve rediscovered, never printed up or exhibited,’ 70-year-old Ian explains over the phone from his home on the edge of Saddleworth Moor in Greater Manchester. Now a new exhibition for the fans who won’t let him retire, Life Goes On, is on show at Salts Mill, Saltaire, and around 75% of the work has not been exhibited there before.

After Ian was expelled from school, he worked for a while at Associated Weavers, Dudley Hill. He says he hated ‘the noise, the shifts, and the boredom of repetitive manual labour. Health and safety wasn’t paramount. I remember sitting in the canteen looking at workers with mutilated hands and missing fingers.’