Historic Railway Sites Around Harrogate
March 2024
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The theme of this shoot is exploring old, historic sites of railway activity around Harrogate, which was my home town at the time. Whilst there's only the single line going through Harrogate as part of the connection between Leeds and York now, there was so much more railway activity in the past, ranging from the mid-late 19th century with the construction of the original Harrogate Brunswick station, to as far as the start of the 1970's when everything had been closed down, including the Narrow Gauge railway of the Harrogate Gasworks company.
This project was made for an assignment, which I had originally come up with two different ideas for. Those wouldn’t have worked though, so this one ended up being sort of last minute. Despite that, I had a lot of fun working on this and it kickstarted the idea to document all former rail sites around Harrogate.
To explain the look of the images, I wanted to be able to stylise them a bit so that each one could have a bit of writing to give context to each one as the average person most likely wouldn't know much of this history, or what they were looking at, so I decided to base the background aesthetic off of the homemade scrapbooks of Railway enthusiasts, where a printed photo would get stuck to a page and some handwriting would be added under it to give a brief summary of what the photo was showing.
I would say the way I pulled this off is simple enough to not distract from the photo, but it's also effective at framing it and giving each one that context they need.
