Mary Evans are kicking off their 2024 licensing year with a new image collection from Photographer Michael Kay — uploaded and license ready, this looks like a great edit!
They say: We’ve got a small but mighty new collection to shout about this week, and one which very much follows in our tradition of representing some of the UK’s finest street photography.
• Photo collection detail: Back in the early 1970s, when Michael Kay was a photography student in Manchester, tasked with a course project, he took his camera out and over six days recorded the people and places of the city. The result is a set of 90 pictures which brilliantly sum up the spirit of 1970s Manchester, and are a lasting memento of destinations now long gone. There are shots of Belle Vue Amusement Park, looking abandoned and forgotten, not to mention the North’s premier dog fanciers’ event, Belle Vue Dog Show, which some of you may recall was also the haunt of another Manchester photographer, the great Shirley Baker. Michael took candid shots of cheeky children playing outside Maine Road stadium or among the rubble of part-demolished streets in Moss Side, while in the background, blocks of modern flats were rising to replace the terraces of old (Michael informs us that some of those were demolished themselves only a decade later).
A student himself, he recorded student demonstrations and rag weeks, while one shot of Manchester’s Piccadilly Station shows a poster about entering the Common Market. How times have changed in the intervening 50 years. Of particular interest are his pictures of the characterful regulars at the Birch Villa Pub. It was later renamed Hardy’s Well and famously bore a poem by Lemn Sissay painted on its side wall. Like so many places featured in these evocative shots, it too has disappeared, demolished in May last year.
View, Search and License from the complete set of photographs by Michael Kay here.
Beautiful! I love his work