Colin Telfer Gifford (born 1936) is a British railway photographer. Gifford pioneered the "New Approach" to railway photography in the 1960s during the declining years of steam. This approach relies heavily on abstraction and sought to encapsulate the dirty working atmosphere of the railway.
Early years
Gifford was born in London in 1936, and grew up near King's Cross. As a child he had no particular interest in railways – though he lived within walking distance of King's Cross station, he was never a trainspotter. Instead, he positioned himself by the ticket barriers, to better watch the flow of travellers and the bustle of station business as much as the trains themselves. It was not until his student days in the late 1950s at Harrow School of Art that he found tangible expression for the visual possibilities that railways offered him.
Though he was more interested in illustration than in photography, he began taking photographs of railway scenes around North London and especially along the Great Central Main Line that passed through Harrow, gradually moving further afield.
Although Bill Brandt is often cited as a major influence, the style that made Gifford's name owed much to the work of a little-known Swiss avant-garde railway photographer Jean-Michel Hartmann, whose book (Editions Amart, 1959) revealed an eye for pattern and form that had an impact on Gifford's pictorial approach.
1960s
In the early 1960s Gifford joined Ian Allan Publishing as art editor and occasionally placed railway photographs in the magazines he designed. He took many of his well-known shots – including images of Bulleid pacifics at speed, captured from trains on adjacent lines – during his daily commute. Thirty years later, one of these images was featured on a Royal Mail stamp. At the publishing house, he redesigned the Combined Volume, Railway World and helped to transform Trains Illustrated into Modern Railways, a large-format monthly for transport professionals. He also designed some trompe-l'œil covers for Model Railway Constructor, including a speeding Trix 'Warship' and a 00 gauge BR Standard Class 9F seemingly emitting an enormous plume of smoke.
Aside from his work at Ian Allan, Gifford continued to build a photographic record of every region of British Railways using a Rolleiflex medium-format twin-lens reflex camera. He also photographed the full length of the River Thames with the idea of one day making a book out of it. His work was predominantly in black and white. For 35 mm colour work he used cheaper, less sophisticated cameras such as the Russian-made Fed; in later years a Pentax SLR.
In 1965 the Decline of Steam book was published. In place of front three-quarter views (with the sun always coming over the photographer's shoulder and the locomotive number clearly visible), Decline of Steam portrayed misty industrial landscapes, sweating railway workers, rain-swept nocturnal platforms, and sulphurous engine sheds. The trains themselves were often almost an afterthought in this vision of the railway as a totality; some images did not feature trains at all. By 1967, Gifford had left his job to focus on photographing the final years of British steam
His work from this time influenced the British photographers John Tickner, Gordon Edgar, and Adrian Freeman in their work on steam trains in China.
Each a Glimpse
Each a Glimpse, his second book, which he also designed, was published by Ian Allan in 1970. Many of the pictures dated from 1967 to 1968 and the influence of Jean-Michel Hartmann – which was strong in Decline of Steam – was less marked in a book that showed how, in those final years of steam, Gifford had begun to experiment with new techniques and find his own visual language, less graphically dynamic and more pictorialist than before.