Shirley Baker, Lou Stoppard (ed.), Mack, 2019
Shirley Baker developed her first photograph as a young girl ‘from the darkness of the coal shed’ in her hometown of Salford, Northwest England. From this moment, she developed a lifelong interest in documentary photography, amounting to a vast and celebrated archival collection that spans the length of her career, dating from the 1950s until 2000. Edited by Lou Stoppard, this book presents an extensive–and, uniquely, female–depiction of post-war life; an eccentric survey which combines her better-known street photographs of Manchester, Salford and Blackpool with previously unseen photographs that span the UK, all the way to the South of France, Italy and Japan. Instances of humour abound in the collection, casting a spotlight on the idiosyncrasies of British identity: a high street shopper cocks his head echoing the mannequin behind him, an older woman with cigarette-wrinkled lips looks into the lens with an almost comic stoicism, children play, mimicking adults. The changing landscapes, fashions, photographic styles and tones that make up the sequence are woven together by Baker’s singular attentiveness to moments of wit and warmth in daily life.
Published November 2019.
Extract
In Shirley Baker’s photographers, men are caught gesturing, or mid stride. Women slip past or sit, reflecting. Sometimes, they are close together, conversing, conspiring. Adolescents posture, often eying their surroundings with distain. Children play, occasionally surveying the camera with a look somewhere between innocence and wisdom. Older people look into the lens with an almost comic stoicism, their years and routines readable on their faces; cigarette-wrinkled lips, helmet-like hair, that, through years, of repetition has grown into a distorted, heightened version of what it once was. In some images, people are staring; not always at Baker, but at some unfurling scene – parents look at their children, beachgoers survey other holidaymakers, shoppers regard new wares. They are, like her, taking in this strange world, wrapped up in a moment.
In Baker’s images, even the unaware seem to perform – their movements amplified, their expressions pre- pared. She unpicks, and questions, the way gender, class and age shape us; how we all act out our identity. She captures the way we all step up into our role – men as men, women as women – and the fine lines between it all; between young and old, powerful and powerless, visible and overlooked. She illustrates nuanced, loaded behaviours and mannerisms with sympathy, precision and humour. We see the physical in- carnation of a good gossip – an older woman leaning into her friend, away from the crowd, to deliver her verbal loot. We see the way a tracksuit-wearing young woman surveys a glamorously dressed mannequin, pondering this man-made representation of ideal femininity; the way a young girl’s hand innocently gropes the breast of a voluptuous statue; the way an older man and a child simultaneously touch sculptures in a museum – the former gesturing with confidence, some thought already in mind, as he highlights the work to others, the latter reaching out in pure, uncomplicated curiosity. Baker had a clear respect for her subjects, yet also a penetrative gaze that could veer, deliciously, toward irony – she, undoubtedly, had a great wit. Her images can, taken alone, read as sentimental, but that is offset by their honesty; they make no attempt to gloss over a gritty street, a collapsing community, the spread of poverty. Typically, curators and historians of photography have tended to prioritise the formally wrought over the casual, the tender, but, look closely, and Baker’s work, and the characters she captures, are never actually quaint or simple.