Edition : First / Paris / Alasdair Mclellan / 2013 / Softcover. / Fine / Fine 4to, 156pp. Printed wraps in wraparound poster, in PVC sleeve. Numerous Colour and Black & White plates. Text in English. One of 2000 copies.
Being from the North of England Alasdair McLellan’s youthful curiosities channeled romantic notions about being English and Northern since he began to photograph in 1986. He has admired those who have directed generations through their own similar obsessions such as Bruce Weber’s playful and sexually charged imagery of America and Steven Patrick Morrissey’s unfaltering melancholy and mythological observations. McLellan’s work maintains both the edginess of these influences as well as the unashamedly lyrical pulse which makes the work a tune for the masses. The Northern, working class aesthetic of Bradford’s Buttershaw Estate, immortalized in Alan Clarke’s classic film Rita, Sue and Bob Too! has continually had a pull for McLellan ‘ his photographs play with the tension of the ordinary in a similarly unselfconscious way as it’s writer Andrea Dunbar. “The name Ultimate Clothing Company came from a shop in my home town of Doncaster, South Yorkshire, where my friends and I used to go and buy jeans,” McLellan told us. “I’ve been working on the book for years. It’s pictures of young men and landscapes, and a lot of the landscapes are from memory: places that I used to go to when I was growing up.”
