Saturday Night and Sunday Morning is a new exhibition inspired by Alan Sillitoe’s groundbreaking novel and the film adaptation directed by Karel Reisz.

First published in 1958, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning ‘helped frame its cultural moment’. It charts a year in the life of Arthur Seaton, machinist in the Nottingham Raleigh cycle factory, and young urban rebel. The novel appeared at the time of a spate of accounts of urban working-class life by academics, playwrights, novelists and documentary filmmakers.

Taking seminal moments from the book and film, this exhibition explores the depiction of these social changes in contemporary photography, focusing in particular on working-class culture in the late 50s and 60s. It highlights the various approaches taken by a generation of photographers drawn to ‘the regions’ in an attempt to capture the authenticity of ‘ordinary lives’.

The exhibition features a selection of never-before-exhibited photographic stills from Reisz’s iconic film, much of which was shot on location in Nottingham. So-called ‘Young Meteors’, John Bulmer and Graham Finlayson, worked for feted newspapers such as The Manchester Guardian and the latest print media magazines, while Roger Mayne and Shirley Baker initiated their own briefs generating new contexts for their photographic studies. Maurice Broomfield, an industrial photographer, diligently portrayed the nobility of factory workers for less glamorous company reports. Their works are complemented in the exhibition by that of other national photographers who have been subsequently overlooked, as well as an array of accomplished local amateurs.

Running concurrently with Saturday Night and Sunday Morning in the Angear Visitor Centre is an exhibition of Stills by Dean Rogers. A graduate of Nottingham Trent University, Dean Rogers has, for the last ten years, worked closely with some of our most talented film directors including Shane Meadows and Anton Corbijn. Unlike conventional 'film' photographers who shoot directly from the camera's perspective, Rogers strives instead to create his own compositions from within the pre-given structure of a film. Commonly catching actors while ‘off set’ and employing a cinematic approach to lighting, his photographs are full of their own narrative possibility and emotion. This exhibition complements the selection of film stills included in the Saturday Night and Sunday Morning exhibition.