Alice Longstaff Exhibition

An exhibition of the exciting, recently revealed work of Alice Longstaff will be held here at Pennine Heritage, Birchcliffe Centre over the Easter weekend, Friday 10 to Monday 13 April, free entry and refreshments will be available.

Alice was a remarkable Hebden Bridge woman who, 100 years ago and aged 14, was apprenticed to a local photographer. She went on to document the life and times of this small northern town for the next 70 years.

However, in addition to the usual studio portraits, weddings and local events, Alice more excitingly embraced candid street-style photography, and often used the last few frames in a roll of film to capture the unplanned and incidental. Hundreds of these strong images of Calderdale folk, often gently humorous and affectionate, have recently been rediscovered and they will be the subject of a series of exhibitions provisionally called Through Alice’s Eyes.

The first of these is that planned for Easter 2020 at the Birchcliffe Centre, Hebden Bridge.

A short video about this new exciting collection is now available. A quality book to accompany these exhibitions will be published by the end of 2020.

The existing collection of her work is well known by many. It was curated and digitized by ourselves Pennine Heritage and can be seen here.

There are many stories to be told through this new exhibition:

• • The uniqueness of Alice Longstaff as a female photographer from a small northern town in the 1950’s taking “candid photographs” never published in her lifetime.

• • Alice, the independently minded woman who left school 100 years ago, aged 14, to be apprenticed and become a professional photographer.

• • The ‘lost negatives’ rediscovery.

• • The high quality of the images The street style photography – way ahead of its time and later taken up by Martin Parr, who began his career in Hebden Bridge

• • The culture and stories behind the images

• • The Pennine Heritage aspects of the story and its wider social significance.

In many ways hers may seem a small life but it was no mean feat to work her way up from apprentice to business owner in a Yorkshire market town and to keep that business going for over 70 years, documenting Hebden Bridge and its people throughout most of the 20^th century.