Ian Macdonald – Fixing Time
Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art, Sunderland

FIXING TIME is the title of a comprehensive exhibition of 50 years’ work by Ian Macdonald, the north-east England photographer and artist. It takes place across two venues, the Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art and Sunderland Museum and Winter Gardens.

Macdonald’s extensive body of work is dedicated to documenting working-class life, and the rise and fall of heavy industry in the north-east in the last decades of the 20th century. This has been, of course, a period marked by huge political shifts and social upheaval. There are a wide range of themes, including People, Towns and Portraits; Greatham Creek, Teeside; Smith’s Dock Shipyard; Redcar Blast Furnace; and School Portraits.

Some detailed large-scale drawings are also included in the exhibition, showing the importance of his training as an artist and draughtsman in the evolution of his distinctive, craftsmanlike photographic practice. Technically, this is based on careful composition, making balanced images using large-format camera equipment, black-and-white film, and traditional, painstaking print-making techniques.

Artistically, the compositions show not only an awareness of “fixing time,” in the sense of capturing the moment as he does with canteen staff at the end of their shiftbut of capturing different times, using light and spatial relationships to convey meaning.

In Cote Hill Island, for example, see how the future, evoked through the broodingly dark sky, the high tide and the horizon of modern industry, threaten to inundate and overwhelm the island of life in the present.

The warmth of Macdonald’s relationship to his subjects also shines through many of the photographs, particularly the series of individual portraits taken at a school, but also in photographs of working people at leisure and at work.

The appreciation and warmth of Macdonald’s approach extends to places as well as people.

Although the photographs have clear documentary value, many of them transcend the particular time and space they are “fixed” in. Some of them have much deeper, timeless meanings. For example, the photograph Family standing on the edge of South Gare on a summer’s evening looking across Tees Bay, positions a family using a dramatic diagonal composition against the hugeness of the sea — is this the vast, unknowable future? Is the world around them, full of beauty and danger? It’s a poetic, mythic image which both stimulates the imagination and generates calmness.

Similarly, a beautiful image of a salmon drying net and boat, stimulates imaginative association with the Cross of Christ, and thus associates his suffering with the suffering of working fishermen.

This is a subtle and complex body of work. It certainly documents the essential truths about working-class life and communities in north-east England over the last 50 years — the heyday of heavy industry and its sad decline — but it goes much further than that. The aesthetic beauty of the images, their deep blacks, clear shining lights and balanced, lively compositions, together with the empathy and warmth of Macdonald’s perspective, draw the viewer into the photographs. 

They kindle our own memories and cause all kinds of ideas, emotions and relationships to be shared. Nostalgia and a sense of wonder and loss are evoked, but there is also a glimpse of some deeper truths which transcend the particular time and place.

Fixing Time at the NGCA runs until November 3 2024, and at Sunderland Museum and Winter Gardens until January 4 2025. 

While visiting the NGCA, you can also catch Jeremy Deller’s best-known work, Battle of Orgreave, a re-enactment of 1984 miners’ strike filmed by Mike Figgis, which is on display to mark the event’s 40th anniversary.