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Sheffield was in decline. In Bill Stephenson’s photos, the city still glows

Tribune Sun

‘There’s a golden hour when everyone loves everyone — and a point where people are ready to punch each other’

Three years ago, at the age of 66, Bill Stephenson hung up his camera. After more than 40 years documenting Sheffield’s working class on film, among other subjects, he had a massive task before him. “I had all these boxes full of negatives, all of this work,” he tells me. “What I wanted to do was scan and catalogue my archive.”

Since then, Stephenson’s personal website has become a gallery of a lifetime’s worth of work, giving his photographs “a second chance” to be seen. Given the nature of many of his projects, depicting communities that were then “on the edge of disappearing” and are now gone, it has made him “really glad that someone invented the internet,” he says. “All these projects and stories are now permanently out there.”

Stephenson moved to Sheffield in 1979, after he was offered a place on the Fine Art course at what is now Sheffield Hallam University. He was 24 by then and had previously lived in Birmingham, Leeds and Nottingham, but it was the specific circumstances of this city in the 1980s that defined the course of his career. “I owe everything to Sheffield. In some ways, I thrived off its industrial decline,” he says, before hurriedly adding: “I’m not saying that’s a silver lining, but I’m very glad I was here to be able to document it.” He became fascinated with capturing the “experience of living in a post-industrial city” — people’s attempts either to escape it or to make the most of where they were.

Contestants pose for a Sheffield Star newspaper photographer at the semi-final of ‘Miss Gazette’ beauty contest

In his student days, the subject that first piqued his interest was public competitions, particularly the beauty contests he found out about through articles in the Star newspaper. As a “fairly shy person,” he couldn’t imagine what would motivate the women involved to put themselves on display. It might have been easy for some people to dismiss the contestants as dupes, women participating in their own objectification because they didn’t know better. What Stephenson discovered was that, for many of them, winning was a road out of Sheffield. “The prizes were usually a modelling contract, cash or an introduction to an agency in London,” he says. “They wanted to win to get out of a city that was then certainly in decline.”

Thus started his fascination with Sheffield’s working class communities. “Right from the beginning, I wanted to take pictures that would reflect the society we live in,” he recalls. “I felt I was describing a community of people who go unnoticed or are considered unimportant and I saw myself as trying to give them a voice.” For his next project, he sought to document a working men’s club, eventually selecting the Dial House in Hillsborough. 

Though it closed in 2005 and has since been redeveloped into flats, in the summer of 1983, the club was at its height. “It was always packed out and definitely the focal point of the community, everybody went there,” Stephenson recalls. He was given access to all areas, including backstage, and asked only to refrain from photographing any performers while they were on stage.

Kirsty Stevens, real name Lesley Sommers, a popular vocalist and dancer at the Dial House

But he was painfully aware that he was witnessing something coming to an end. The steel and coal industries were in the process of collapsing and an entire way of life was being decimated as a result. “These works became historic documents,” he says. “Even at the time, I was aware that they would become records of a particular place and time.” It meant he felt a responsibility to be as truthful as possible — “veracity” is a huge part of his work — although he confesses to having “a little bit of bias towards socialism”. 

It took him a while, he recalls, to find a working men’s club that was willing to fully welcome him. “Unless you have access, you have nothing at all,” he argues, which is why he is “very careful” about how he approaches his subjects. “I wouldn’t immediately start off taking photos. I go along, talk to people and try to fit in,” he says. “I used to smoke back then and would hand out cigarettes. I wouldn’t say I ingratiated myself but I would watch what was going on, so that I knew what I portrayed was truthful.” In the case of Dial House, he spent several weeks watching shows, sinking pints and getting into the good graces of “key people,” the ones who could put in a good word with everyone else, before he ever reached for his camera. 

Stan Mathews, a club regular, in his usual spot

I note that one of the things that stands out to me about the culture he depicts is its unfettered sexuality. There are nude calendars everywhere — from the pub to the workplace — and the Dial House even had “stag lunches,” where a comedian performed in between strip shows from three exotic dancers. “I wanted to portray what was going on and sexualised imagery was everywhere, but I do try to be a little provocative with what I’m doing as well,” Stephenson admits. “Photography is a competitive business so you need your photos to stand out.” He recalls one photo, of a hen party at Josephine’s in Barkers Pool, which horrified him. “I selected that photo because the audience are looking horrified,” he says, although I’m not quite sure I see it. “Some are laughing, some are aghast.”

Hen Night bride and male stripper, with a banana protruding from his thong, at Josephine’s Nightclub

I ask if he ever worried he was in danger of reinforcing a stereotypical view of the working-class through the moments he chose to highlight. While he concedes this was a “possibility,” he says this is why he was so determined to see each photo put it in its proper context. He took a pen and paper, or a Dictaphone, with him everywhere and always wrote an introduction and captions for his work that explained what was going on. “Otherwise they can be misunderstood.” Take the aforementioned stag lunches. “The money from that used to pay for trips for the children. For many of those children, that was really the only holiday they were going to get.” In an odd coincidence for Stephenson, one of these expenses-paid trips was to Butlin’s in Skegness, where he had first started his photography career in 1977.

Excited boy and sleeping girl en route to Butlin’s

Stephenson credits his summer season at Butlin’s with getting him used to “working in packed environments,” a talent he put to good use when he was commissioned to photograph in Sheffield’s clubs, on behalf of film companies scouting for possible locations. In the early 1990s, for example, he attended “rock night” at Rebels, one of the most popular rock clubs in the north of England. “You’ve got to know the point in the evening where people go from being happy to aggressive drunks, when it’s best to put the camera down,” he says. “There’s definitely a golden hour where you can take pictures, when everybody loves everyone, and then a point where people are ready to punch each other.”

Air guitar contestants at ‘Rock Night’ at Rebels

He was never punched during any of his projects, he says, which could be down to his respectful approach and ability to talk his way out of sticky situations — or the fact that he’s 6’2” and thus someone people might want to leave alone. Whatever the reason, this knack for emerging unscathed likely came in handy as he followed Sheffield United during the 1989-90 promotion year. 

It was a fantastic time to be following the club, he recalls. “It’s a shame Sheffield United are doing so badly but, at that period, they were going up a league, winning game after game, and there was a lot of enthusiasm.” He’d become a fan of the team in his student days, since he could see part of the grounds from his bedroom window and would watch matches on rainy days. “I could see the game being played but not either goal, so I got to learn from the sound the crowd made whether it was a goal, a miss or a foul.”

Back then, Sheffield United was not only having more success on the pitch but also had its own dedicated crew of hooligans: the Blades Business Crew (BBC). Stephenson can instantly remember the man in my favourite picture from this series, even though he doesn’t have his pictures in front of him. “He wasn’t threatening at all to me, he was rather pleased to be photographed,” he says. “He was a poseur, as well as a hooligan. It was actually him who suggested taking the photo in front of the police.” 

A member of the Blades Business Crew (BBC)

Stephenson didn’t just photograph people in their downtime either. For a few projects, he was given the opportunity to document the declining industries in which many members of the community had worked. I’m particularly charmed by a picture of a worker washing down an oil spill at the Bolsover Coalite plant in Derbyshire, although Stephenson’s favourite is one of a scannerman on the night shift, posing in front of a railing. “In the background there’s a trail of lights, which looked to me as if he was on a spacecraft,” he recalls. “This place was its own entity, it was a living, breathing machine.”

By far Stephenson’s most famous work, however, is Streets in the Sky, a 1988 series of portraits of tenants living in Hyde Park flats. The high-rise estate used to stand next to Park Hill flats but was demolished only a few years later. “At the time, people disliked that kind of architecture and they felt sorry for people that lived there,” he says. “When I started, I thought I should include a lot of the architecture. I wasted a lot of time placing people in that environment but then I scrapped all of that.”

Tony ‘The Ton’ Greaves and Martin, aged eight, outside the ‘Pop In’ centre

Stephenson had expected to find residents who felt dwarfed by the concrete jungle and desperate to leave; his original compositions had been intended to reflect this mood. Before long, he’d realised that what was actually in front of him was “a very cohesive community” of people who thoroughly enjoyed the estate. “It was about dispelling stereotypes,” he says, of the eventual resulting project. “The people most critical of the place were those that had never lived there.”

This is not to say that he shies away from depicting the more grim side of life in high-rise estates, or of working-class life in general. In the early 1990s, he took part in Heart of our City, a photographic project aiming to educate people about how to prevent coronary heart disease, in which he particularly focused on the impact of stress. One of his subjects, Annie Foster, lived a solitary life in a top-floor flat near London Road, following the death of her husband. I ask him if it was upsetting to photograph people living through hardship, knowing he could do little to help. “All you can do is publicise the conditions that people live in,” he says, and hope that spurred people to act. 

Annie pegs her washing out on her balcony

Stephenson’s work does not focus entirely on Sheffield — he spent a significant amount of time in Honduras, for example, mainly photographing people with HIV and AIDs. What ties his decades-long career together, other than a focus on the disenfranchised and overlooked, is the central importance of its story. “What was very important to me was the narrative the picture told,” he says, whereas other photographers might choose to focus more on producing something visually appealing. “Sometimes, if I had a great picture but the story was meaningless, I would leave it out.”

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