Hockney.
My tenuous connection with him.
It won’t have escaped anyone’s attention that the painter (and photographer) David Hockney died on the 11th of June. Later that day we had some of the family round at our house and we naturally talked about it. During the conversation I suddenly remembered a connection that I had with him from 1987.
I mentioned that I had put up a big exhibition of his work in a large mill building in Yorkshire and had been asked to photograph all of the people who came to the opening. I was immediately urged to find the negatives and to tell people about it.
A little bit of background: The mill in question is known as Salts Mill and it has an interesting history:
Salts Mill is named after a Victorian industrialist called Sir Titus Salt. It was the largest industrial building in the world when it was built between 1851 and 1871. Salt also built the town around it for his workers and named it after himself. Saltaire (a combination of his surname and the river Aire than runs past the mill).
Salt moved his 5 mills from nearby Bradford to the area to combine his workers and build a new, larger textile mill by the Leeds and Liverpool Canal. The area also had growing railway links and was ideal for transporting goods.
He built neat stone workers houses with running water which were a great improvement on the slum housing they had experience previously. He built a Hospital, Bath house, Library, Reading room, School, Allotments, Concert hall and Gymnasium. The combination of better housing, leisure and education made Saltaire an example to the world. Planners from Japan visited in 1872 during a tour of industrial Britain to see how it worked.
The mill ceased production in 1986.
In 1983 another huge mill by the name of Dean Clough in nearby Halifax was bought by an entrepreneur by the name of Jonathan Silver and his business partner Ernest Hall. They had different ideas about what to do with it, so Hall bought out Silver, who then went travelling for a while. Needing a new challenge, Jonathan Silver decided to buy Salts mill in 1987.
Jonathan was born in Bradford and by the mid 80’s had 13 menswear shops across the UK. He bought the mill and decided to make it into a gallery, restaurant, and business centre.
He began by making one of the huge rooms into a gallery for Bradford born Hockney, who was a friend of his and that is where I came into the scene. My friend Robert had worked with Jonathan Silver in london and knew him well.
Robert and myself spent a couple of months hanging Hockney drawings, paintings and prints on chains from the old mill pipes that ran round the room. The exhibition is still there and the mill has become a real tourist spot.
On the evening of the exhibition opening on the first of November 1987, the great and the good of Yorkshire arrived and I photographed each small group as they arrived. It was a stressful job at times, with rolls of film having to be changed as multiple people were entering the gallery and my flashgun charge times becoming longer and longer as the batteries drained. I had no assistant, so had to be on top of the technical side and do people management at the same time.
I got the job done, supplied Jonathan with five contact sheets and heard no more about it. Perhaps the contacts just got put in a drawer and forgotten about.
Jonathan died in 1997 aged 47 and his wife Maggie and Jonathan’s brother Robin kept the place going. It is now run by his daughter Zoe who appears on the contact sheets as a child.
I hadn’t made any contacts for myself, so the images were unseen for 39 years until I was urged to find them again. I placed the negs on a lightbox, shot them on a digital camera and inverted them to make positives. I have scanned a few at a higher resolution for this article.
Looking through the images I found that Hockney himself was not on them, as he hadn’t attended the show (I had totally forgotten that). His father, mother and brother were there and I spotted a few people that I remember from those days, but most were total strangers in odd looking 80’s clothes.
At the end of the show Robert took my camera and asked me to pose next to one of the pictures.
We are still friends today and coincidentally I bumped into him whilst out shopping on the day I scanned these.
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Andrew Sanderson June 2026.
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First off, your hair was magnificent! Second, I always love how photos change their meaning as they get older. What were once just technically proficient snaps now have an aura of history. Perhaps folks at the mill, especially the daughter, would like to see these now?
Fantastic, Andrew. You've got a great memory of the finer details from 39 years ago. Nice work balancing flash with the ambient light, all in sharp focus. Nice one. I'd never have recognised you from the last picture.