An exhibition of Pat Maycroft's photographs and poetry is making its way around the North-East. Women's Editor Christen Pears reports.

EVERY picture tells a story and as Pat Maycroft thumbs through her collection, the anecdotes flow. "The taxi drivers thought I was mad with this one when I asked them if I could project an image from their windows upstairs," she recalls.

It's easy to see why as there, across the street, projected on to the swimming baths wall was a huge image of her mother as a child in her swimming costume. Later in the same collection is the next chapter in a living history of Middlesbrough. The second picture shows Gilkes Street Baths being torn down, the final scene, a betting shop with other buildings attached.

It is all part of the attraction for Pat, a lecturer in photography at Darlington College of Technology, as she chronicles her way around her beloved North-East.

"I have always enjoyed taking pictures and still do," she says. "With most of my pictures there is a little story to go with it or a memory. I just love documenting events."

It's always been that way since she was ten years old, living in her home town of Middlesbrough, when her father gave her that all-important first Box Brownie to photograph her dog.

After leaving school, Pat completed an apprenticeship in hairdressing, married and moved to Zambia, where she lived for almost seven years raising two children and developing her interest in photography.

But it was to be another 12 years before she enrolled on a City & Guilds photography course at Darlington College and her career began to blossom. She soon became a part-time lecturer in photography and an Associate of the Royal Photographic Society. Her work has gained acclaim for its portrayal of the lower fells of south-west Durham, an area which provides a unique mix of farm grazing land and relics from a once-thriving coal and ore mining industry. Here she took one of her favourite pictures, of an abandoned Land Rover with a tall nettle for a gear lever.

Whether she's using digital techniques or conventional photography, Pat's ability to capture fine detail, along with an eye for the obscure, has earned her the apt description of 'poet of the lens'.

She remains at the head of the field in digital imaging, at the forefront of technology, but applying it as an art form rather than a processing tool.

For the technophobes, Pat's philosophy is simplicity. Her three principal tools are a Pentax 35mm, an Olympus digital and an Epson flat bed scanner, though she has been known to use an MPP Large Format camera, a Bronica ERTS and a home-made pin-hole camera.

An interest in creative writing led Pat to be one of the founder members of the Darlington-based Vane Women, who meet at the town's Arts Centre. She contributes poems and is instrumental in providing cover designs for many of the group's publications.

Since 1989 Pat has exhibited work in Darlington, Middlesbrough, Newcastle, Bath, Birmingham and London. July 2002 saw the launch of her first book, Northern Grit, a collection of 30 photographs with poems inspired by her images. Her pictures have appeared in several books and periodicals.

Her latest exhibition takes the book's name and is currently touring the region, a showcase to celebrate the fusion of photography and creative writing. It features black and white images of buildings and landscapes covering several years of Pat's life and providing the inspiration for Vane Women's prose.

"They show the environment in neglect, but I try to do this sympathetically rather than tragically," she says. "It is all part of my landscape, where remnants of decaying industries mingle with wild flowers and lark song. So I try to find the subtle beauty of derelict buildings, empty rooms and broken machines."