The conversion of mainstream photography to digital--it is the predominant technology for photography --- has actually stimulated interest in older processes to the quieter, more craft-based approach. Tim Rudman, the British photographer and master printer, is currently having a show at Gold Street Gallery. His printing and toning processes derive from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,

Rudman says of his series of photographs of the The Victorian era West Pier at Brighton England that it:

was closed and inaccessible for twenty five years after being deemed unsafe. Cut off from land, it was abandoned to the elements and in the last two and a half decades its only visitors were the pigeons and sea birds that made it their home. In the winter months they were joined by some fifty thousand starlings and their flocks became a local feature. I still have memories of being taken on the pier in my childhood and I have watched its slow decline with sadness. I was granted access to photograph the very unsafe pier, until it collapsed into the sea.

The series--unfinished--was an exploration of Rudman's past and some of the feelings from there that were uncovered when he entered this sad pier in its derelict years. Rudman is a member of the Arena Photographers from the South.