Coincidence or Design?

These are two prints from my exhibition ‘All Around Leominster – photos from the 1980s’.

I took them in 1985 and 1984 when I was learning to become a photographer (I’m still learning).

The one on the left is of Dimarco’s fish and chip shop, taken on one cold evening in 1985. The photo on the right was taken through a broken bus stop window (when bus stops were made of reinforced concrete and wired glass) in 1984.

I could tell you lots about each place and why and how I took these photos, but that’s not the point of this post.

When I took them, I didn’t know who was in them, they aren’t really the main reason for taking them. However, the photos are nothing without them.

As far as I was concerned, there is a young lad in the chip shop looking out at me, taking a photo. In the other photo, I captured an older man walking along South Street, opposite the Moravian Church, towards the town centre, who spotted me using the broken glass as a ‘frame’ in my photo (to be fair I had spotted him and tracked him until he entered the frame).

They are hung next to each other on the gallery wall as my wife curated and set out the prints into logical groups (something that I don’t seem to be able to do). There are also two other prints that feature windows in this group on the gallery wall.

So what is significant about this?

They both feature members of the same family.

Darrel Maund identified the man in the broken window photo as his grandfather. Then someone pointed out that Darrel himself was the lad looking out of Dimarco’s fish and chip shop window.

Coincidence or design?

I just love that these two photos have come together like this, something that would not have happened if I hadn’t set out to re-visit the old black and white films that I took in the 1980s.

I wish I had taken more…….

Luckily I also have lots of photos from the 1990s, in fact I have about 300 films from those two decades which is about 10,000 individual frames.

You can visit ‘All Around Leominster – photos from the 1980s’ until Saturday 31st May when it closes.

The good news is that I will be having another exhibition in May 2026.