I'm going to have a go at blogging again. It's winter, my motorsport photography season is just about over so I'm going to have a bit more time on my hands to bore you to death by rambling on about the stuff I like to photograph or the places I've been to recently. I'm not promising it'll be any good, I'm not even promising to keep it up but you never know, we might both get to like it.
So to kick off, literally, here's a few pictures from the home of Frickley Athletic FC, a place that looks like the Germans missed it when they passed overhead a few decades ago. It's a smashing little stadium with some very amusing advertising banners but it stands in an area that has been completely flattened. I don't know South Elmsall that well but I do know it was in the heartland of Yorkshire coal mining so I'm guessing that the place was devastated after the pit closed. To be honest it looks like the recovery may still be some way off.
I've worked at Frickley Athletic on several occasions so I know the stadium pretty well but I wasn't quite prepared for the warm welcome I got on the day I just called in to see if I could grab a few pictures of the place. I got a great tour of the areas that you never normally see and the old boys who showed me around even offered me the manager's job (they were desperate). But I guess that's the difference between the big guns and the minnows; the little guys have always got time for a chat and to ask about why you're doing something in a manner that suggests they're interested in what you're doing. Cameras often arouse suspicion and it's not unusual to get chased off but these lads at Frickey seemed genuinely please that I was interested in their stadium.
I only had half an hour to spare on the day I called in but it was an important half an hour nonetheless. You see, I came away from Frickley Athletic with a gift. A little blue book called the Evo-Stik league handbook. It's got the contact details for every non league club in England, it's got locations, directions, names and phone numbers. It's a little gold mine.
That little gift they gave me at Frickley has given my football ground fascination a new direction and I'm now less drawn to the big stadia, and becoming a bit obsessed by the quirky back street hideaways of the non league clubs. I'm trying to photograph as many of them as I can, I'm trying to define the effect on our landscape of football grounds whilst at the same time attempting to explore the character of those grounds.
It's a project that seems to stop and start and I know it's something that's been done before but I've spent my life in stadiums and I guess I want to illustrate what they mean to me.
As a little boy my Grandad dragged me to the Watersheddings, Boundary Park and Maine Road. As a teenager I watched the rugby sevens at Happy Valley in Hong Kong and as an adult I had many happy nights watching Bolton Wanderers at Burnden Park. As a working photographer I've been to literally hundreds of others from Valley Parade to the Baseball Ground, from Molineux to Carrow Road. They all have their quirks and some are simply spectacular but I love them most when they're empty.
And I suppose that's what I'm trying to get at with this little project of mine, they are just spaces. Edifices. Grass and plastic. Wood and Concrete. That's what I'm hoping to show you.
-Mark
