Luis Bustamante: Photographs of Hull in the 1970s

Arriving in the UK as a political refugee from Chile on Christmas Eve 1974, Luis Bustamante was one of thirty Chileans welcomed by the city after fleeing oppression in his homeland. His photographs of Hull offer a rare chance to see the city’s past through an outsider’s eye — capturing the faces and streets that shaped his first impressions and helped him make sense of his new home.

Polical Refugee

Luis: “These photographs are a record of my first contact with Britain in the 1970s, when I arrived as a refugee. They are an attempt to connect with a reality that felt alien yet somehow recognisable. I was thrown in at the deep end, landing in a place that was both safe and mystifying at the same time.

When you arrive in a new place, you can’t yet read the codes or understand the social connections; they are challenging, to say the least. However, Hull University provided a welcoming environment that helped us adjust.

Connection

“Taking photographs of the place happened without much of a plan. I wasn’t looking back — and we could hardly see ahead — we were simply suspended in the moment. I didn’t photograph the cutting edge, where challenge was turning into asymmetric conflict: the expressions of discontent, the picket lines, the sense of justice on one side and raw power on the other. But I could sense how the social order had reached a pivotal junction.

This lack of an agenda didn’t feel like a dilemma at the time. The camera served two purposes: it was both a connection to a new life and a shield that allowed me to look at it. A camera gives you permission to stare, and it provides an excuse to be in the way. For an outsider, it offers a chance — however fleeting — to belong.

Photographs bring together personal stories with passing moments in history.

Road Story

“This is a road story in more than one way. Photographs tell the author’s glamorised biography and provide a snapshot of a time and a space. The best photographic stories have intimacy, like Eugene Smith’s, but road stories are superficial. They are more instinctive than emotional. The Argentine writer Julio Cortázar defined photographs as a binary enquiry. He questions whether gossamers floating in the autumn air are the yarns of the Virgin or the spit of the Devil. In one of his short stories, a photographer takes a picture of a couple in a park and the process of developing and enlarging it exposes an alarming reality invisible at the moment of pressing the shutter. This is the principle that presides over the way the original negatives were processed for this set.”

Darkroom

“The original negatives were digitised in-house trying to preserve their analogue quality, basically to be able to preserve the grain structure and not substitute it with some digital artefact. This was done by reclaiming an old darkroom, its enlargers, lenses, and clocks, into a digital suite. The files produce prints that show that the mutation from analogue to digital was a great advance in revealing the whole story contained in the silver grains of the negative.”

"Luis has conducted extensive documentary photography throughout the UK and in his native South America. Luis' rich archive is an important social record and encapsulates a time of significant political and industrial change in the UK.