Street life caught on camera

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London Street Photography 1860-2010

Edited by Mike Seaborne and Anna Sparham

‘Un-posed scenes that trigger an immediate emotional response, especially humour or fascination with ambiguous or surreal happenings’: so runs one definition of street photography, from contemporary photographer Nick Turpin. Turpin himself is one of the 70-odd photographers in this stimulating collection, published to coincide with the exhibition ‘London Street Photography 1860–2010’, which ran at the Museum of London from February to September 2011.

Unlike more composed and self-consciously artistic photos, the often spontaneous quality of these photographs gives them a greater transparency, in the sense that the viewer seems to witness the scene afresh for themselves: ‘The best thing about street photography,’ says photographer Philip Greenspun, ‘is that it is possible for the viewer to see more than the original photographer’.

The earliest photos, with their long exposures, show moving people and vehicles like slippery ghosts, and of course the collection is ghostly in other ways: not only are the people in the monochrome photos now dead, for the most part, but long-vanished sights include Valentine Blanchard’s 1862 photo of Temple Bar when it stood across Fleet Street and obstructed the traffic.  London street photography seems to have begun with the work of Blanchard in the 1860s, and other notable early photographers include John Thomson (whose 1877 series ‘Street Life in London’ was taken after his photographic work in China, giving it an almost ethnographic aspect) and Paul Martin, who snatched candid shots of passers-by in the 1890s by disguising his camera as a parcel.

The 1930s produced some particularly strong street photography, helped by improving technology (Rolleiflex and Leica brought new standards to hand-held camera work). There were gifted European emigrés such as Bill Brandt and Wolf Suschitzky, who took some vivid photos of the Charing Cross Road area. The period saw a renewed interest in documenting ‘ordinary’ life (contemporary with the Mass Observation project, in which earnest young men from Oxbridge went out recording conversations in pubs and buses).

Many of these photos have the fascination of time travel, but not the easy charm of sentimental nostalgia. To look at the cast of the monochrome photos is often to receive a sense of underlived lives, and to be reminded that for the great mass of people there were no ‘good old days’. Londoners looked strikingly different even in the quite recent past: more heavily and formally dressed, older for their ages, and more obviously constrained by social class. The middle-aged working man – perhaps an artisan or shifter – in Jerome Liebling’s Outside Claridge’s Hotel (1967) looks as if he might be playing a bit part in an Ealing comedy.

The city has also changed: an anonymous photo from 1962 records a pipe-smoking, bowler-hatted man crossing Westminster Bridge and emerging from a heavy mist that obscures the Houses of Parliament behind him; a reminder of the ‘pea-souper’ fogs that pervaded London well into living memory. Large swathes of relatively central London were very run down in the post-war years, including those recorded by Roger Mayne in his pictures of Notting Hill, Paddington, and North Kensington, with their all-white, tie-wearing pavement gamblers, loafers, and street football players.

Multi-culturalism makes its appearance only slowly: a black woman in a heavy coat stands isolated and statuesque in Felix Man’s 1934 photo of Piccadilly Circus, in those days a centre of prostitution. The black man being hugged outside a pub on Portobello Road looks more genuinely at home, in a photo taken three decades later by Jamaican-born photographer Charlie Phillips. By the book’s last section, from 1980 to 2010, the London scene becomes inescapably multi-ethnic.

The photos themselves have changed in several respects by the final section. A jokey formalism has crept into a few: a pigeon and some pedestrians walking in line, for example, with the pigeon in close-up, or a couple of shoppers’ faces obscured by hanging underpants in a street market, with the title It’s Pants in Peckham. The recent colour photographs have a greater emphasis on the chaotic moment – a leaping dog, laughing women in sunglasses, people briefly half-hidden or faceless. They catch the often inconsequential and contingent feeling of urban life, as in the wide-angle shot of pedestrians and traffic in a 2005 photo of Wimbledon by Mike Seaborne, curator of the Museum of London’s photography collection.

This admirable book draws on a collection that, in the 30 years since it appointed its first photography curator in 1979, has become one of the Museum’s great strengths. The photographs are complemented by a final section giving brief biographies of the photographers, and even in the Google era this proves to be a useful and satisfying way of conveying information; we discover, for example, that Wolf Suschitzky not only photographed pavements before the war but went on to work in films, becoming the cinematographer for the cult Michael Caine movie Get Carter.   [798]

London Street Photography 1860–2010 edited by Mike Seaborne and Anna Sparham is published by Museum of London in association with Dewi Lewis Publishing, 2011. 119 pp., 16 colour and 94 mono/duotone illus. ISBN 978-1-907893-03-2