What is the MRPC?
Our leader Ian Cowley tells all.
MRPC or Modern Rail Photographic Circle to give it its full - and not very snappy – title started as a sort of poor man’s Phoenix. By the 70s and early 80s we’d seen several books devoted to the work of Phoenix members and imagining it (quite wrongly as it turned out) to be a tightly closed clique, a group of us decided to start our own circulating portfolio. MRPC operates on a very informal basis – so informal in fact that I couldn’t tell you exactly when we started - so our 25th Anniversary celebratory book, to be published in IA’s 35 quid series, will be a bit of a hit and miss affair! That’s the other thing about MRPC - its members have to put up with its Secretary’s rather heavy handed ‘humor’!
We’ve never got round to formulating any specific aims, rather tending to take it for granted that we enjoy seeing other people’s railway pix, stealing their ideas for the master shot, arguing about how much sky tone a picture should have and bemoaning the dire state of British railway publishing. An important ingredient is the social factor. It helps that most of the membership lives in East Anglia and a couple of groups see each other on a fairly regular basis, usually in some congenial hostelry. There’s also an ‘AGM’ – a good excuse for everybody to get together, show some slides, pass round a box of pix and wonder how long MB’s going to hang on to the box for this time round. We’ll also discuss whether to allow a) steam pix and b) (now becoming more pertinent) tram shots. Then we’ll forget what we decided, causing long debates on the crit sheets when somebody puts one in.
Everybody’s got their own idea of what makes the perfect railway pic – especially where modern traction is concerned but, by and large, we’re fairly tolerant of each other’s views. Each of our boxes contains crit sheets on which each member can comment on the picture submitted and a note book in which people can report on their experience with new products or techniques, reveal the cheapest source of XP2, wonder how anyone ever gets a decent result from Delta 400 and generally put the railway world to rights.
If all this doesn’t sound too anarchic for you, we’d welcome one or two new faces. We currently have 12 members and 16 is probably the most we’d like for practical purposes (hang on, that’s 4 new faces!) So if you’d like to join the happy throng, e-mail Martyn and attach a couple of your pix. There are two boxes supposedly in circulation (come on, MB and JC!) and both contain prints (mostly b/w but also colour). As you can see from this site, the Secretary is on the verge of entering the 20th if not the 21st century so digital prints can be submitted. Look forward to hearing from you. Ian Cowley