On returning to Chalmers, forty years later.

It has been almost forty years since this collection was shown at the Weftgate in its entirety, and I am aware that its return is, for some of our older visitors, a homecoming. I am aware equally that for younger ones, the name Edwin Chalmers may land as unfamiliar — an oddity, a slightly old-fashioned footnote to the British documentary tradition. This letter is addressed, gently, to both.

The work was first acquired by the Weftgate in March 1979, through the bequest of Margaret Allingham, whose connection to the photographer was never publicly recorded and is, one hopes, none of our business. What she left us was forty silver-gelatin contact prints of the Yorkshire and Northumbrian coast, made over nineteen years. They are not rare; the negatives are in the Shepherd Archive at Sheffield Hallam. What is rare is Chalmers's own hand in the printing, and the generosity of sequence with which he assembled them into a coherent forty-print suite. What we show this season is, as closely as we can manage, the work as he wanted it read.

We have written a new catalogue to accompany the exhibition — a proper, 112-page essay collection with reproductions, new scholarship from Dr Asa Leith, and Chalmers's own unpublished printing notes. It is on sale in the shop; I've priced it as affordably as the production would allow, because the work deserves circulation more than it deserves margin.

Please take your time with the rooms. I hope they mean something to you.