For some unknown reason, I seem to have forgotten that some months ago, I was shortlisted in the Portrait section of the British Photographic Awards for my photograph of the late Ronald Morgan, part of my series on the heirs of the East London group.
I photographed Ronald, an extraordinarily prolific painter in his sparse Art Deco flat in Bow that was also his studio. Every room was full of paintings and easels – a warren of creativity and colour.
Ronald, a much respected artist, was a charming, charming man and I enjoyed a wonderful couple of hours with him.
A couple of years ago, the Spitalfields Life blog published a rather lovely book called East End Vernacular. It featured the work of the almost forgotten East London Group – a collection of painters who showed together from 1928 to 1936 and who all portrayed everyday life in a changing East End. They were mostly working class, realist painters who drew and painted what they saw around them. The book struck a real chord with me. As I’ve written many times before, I grew up in the 1970s in a grim and gloomy Hackney; a much changed landscape from the gentrified hipster hangout of today. As soon as I could, I fled the tower blocks and the grainy streets and made a career photographing (and sometimes writing about) the places that I could only imagine as a child. I spent more than two decades working (and sometimes living) mostly in Indian and Africa – but pretty much anywhere across the world that wasn’t where I was from. So the book was like a window into the past for me – more because it featured what I might call the heirs of those original artists. People like Jock McFadyen, Anthony Eyton and Dan Jones (a reproduction of whose painting of Brick Lane in the 1970s we now have on our wall at home) who painted a more contemporary vision of my formative streets.
A year ago I decided to try and photograph them all at home, in the studio or making work on the streets in a way to reconnect with my own past. The photographs connect in some way with my last book, The Englishman and the Eel as a form of re-discovery and trying (at last) to come to terms with that. It’s been a long process: a quick look at the embarrassingly extensive archive of this blog shows that I was stumbling around trying to find an answer to that more than ten years ago. See here for more on that.
Anyway, I digress. With the help of the Gentle Author, I managed to make contact with them all and each was generous with their time and thoughts. My only regret is of course being too late to manage to photograph one of my heroes, Leon Kossoff who had been ill for some time and died recently. He had a studio off Dalston Lane in the early 1970s and I remember seeing some of his work of my local area as a teenager and thinking clearly how the world could be made to seem different.
Here are three images from the portrait set of twelve. You can see the rest of them on my site here. For those technically minded, I wanted a clean, simple look to them all and decided rather than to shoot them as reportage, I’d use one or two Elinchrom Ranger heads on each set-up trying (OK… sometimes three) to make them look not lit but as natural as possible.
I’m delighted that one of the traditional Pie and Mash shops that I was privileged to photograph a couple of years ago has been given Grade II Listed status.
According to the citation, “The building, which was first opened to the public in 1929, has been given the accolade for its ‘beautifully preserved interiors’, which have never been replaced or modernised”
I wrote and photographed at length about London’s dying Pie and Mash shops (and jellied eels) on this blog last year. See here.
Here’s a small selection of images from Manzes in Walthamstow Market.
UK – London – L Manze Eel, Pie and Mash Shop in Walthamstow East London. Although the shop still trades under the Manze name it is now independently owned and no longer part of the Manze family business.
UK – London – Manze’s Eel, Pie and Mash shop in Walthamstow, East London,
UK – London – The interior (including the painted tin tiles on the ceiling) of Manze’s Eel, Pie and Mash shop in Walthamstow
UK – London – Manze’s Eel, Pie and Mash shop in Walthamstow, East London, UK. Although the shop still trades under the original Manze name, it is now independently owned and no longer part of the Manze family. This resturant is a Grade-2 listed building with antique pressed-tin tiles on the ceiling
UK – London – Period tiling at Manze’s Eel, Pie and Mash shop in Walthamstow, East London
UK – London – Details of an antique cash register at Manze’s Eel, Pie and Mash shop in Walthamstow,
The first question people asked me was ‘why are you doing a blog?’. The second was ‘why have you called it something daft like that?’.
The ‘why’ about having a blog is easy – the pretentious title is a little more tricky. Bear with me.
Those of you that know me know that I grew up in Hackney. A tricky place – “worst services, best crime” as Iain Sinclair would have it in That Red Rose Empire. In the 1970’s when the Holly Street estate in Dalston was a byword for all that was wrong with urban town planning, crime and decay, I sometimes used to go with my father to Brick Lane on a Sunday. The ‘Lane in those days was a very different place. Full of pavement stalls selling one shoe, dirty second hand clothes and the like. At one end would be the Spitalfields market where you could still see the tramps as we used to call them drinking themselves to death with meths around bonfires of refuse and rotting vegetables. At the other end would be Club Row, an infamous market for pets and small animals. You could buy all manner of bizarre creatures from all manner of bizarre creatures. At this end too would be the regular National Front demonstration: a handful of men with Union Jacks in a little corner snarling at the Bangladeshi’s that walked past. None of this meant particularly much to me as a boy. I used to walk through the swarming crowds oblivious to the now well documented history of the area. For my father, though he never spoke about it, this had a resonance. A ‘rubbish’ Jew as my non-Jewish mother always said (with a penchant for bacon and no idea of the religious duties thousands of years of Judaism had passed to him) we’d walk past the Nazis which of course echoed the speeches of Mosley that he would have heard in Ridley Road Market in the thirties (and indeed fiftees) as he grew. We’d also walk past the Mosque on Brick Lane that used to be a synagogue that was the heart of the old Jewish East end. On the side, high up – so far that if you looked, you’d certainly bump into someone coming the other way – was a sundial. The title page of this blog is the inscription on the sundial on that palimpsest of a building.
Built in 1743 the imposing square frame was originally a church built by the Huguenots, French Protestants exiled from their homelands who came to the area, a slum outside the city gates where they built beautiful houses and prospered. The inscription “we are but shadows” in Latin seemed to echo the refugee experience that I suppose I am part of. I’ve never worked much in England, never felt the need as many photographers do, to explore their surroundings. For me, I was always interested in the Other. Perhaps it was about escape, a desperate run from Hackney. The world is a big place and we don’t have long: ‘we are but shadows’ reminds me of the impermanence and transitory nature of what we are – and I wanted to know as much of the world as I could. Photography has in some small measure allowed me to do that.
Ironically, when I started as a photographer I was drawn to these places that I had walked with my (even then elderly) father. Quite by accident I’d stumbled on the last days of the Jewish East End – specifically an organisation called “Food for the Jewish Poor” – a charity that had once given soup and later tins of food to the last elderly Jewish survivors of the area. I turned up and asked if I could hang around and take some pictures for my portfolio. Little did I know that I was following in the footsteps of the sadly underrated Sharon Chazan a young photographer who a few years before had undertaken a large project to record much of Jewish London and was murdered by one of her elderly subjects, Moshe Drukash. A strange, tragic happening in an area of strange, tragic happenings.
Shadows on shadows.
Here are some of the images that I made. I only found them a few days ago… They’ve never been seen publicly before and I hadn’t seen them for nearly twenty years…
An old man leaves the Soup Kitchen in Brune Street in East London which was erected by the Jewish community in 1902 to provide charitable support for Jewish immigrants to the area. The facility closed in the early 1990's as more and more of the original Jewish residents died or moved. The charity gave free food to elderly Jewish residents of the areaAn old man collects his grocery allowance from the Soup Kitchen for the Jewish Poor in Brune Street near Brick Lane.An old woman collects her grocery allowance from the Soup KitchenAn old boxer poses for the camera while he waits for his weekly food parcel from the Soup Kitchen
The Soup Kitchen is now expensive flats for wealthy City types and my father is long gone.
