| | | Chris Steele-Perkins
England, My England
Photographs jog the mind.
Photographs can embrace you in a warm hug of memory, a shocked pause of recollection, or a visual jolt of the unexpected. I lived in England through most of the period that Chris Steele-Perkins documents in his book England, My England: A Photographer's Portrait (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Northumbria Press, 2009). I can remember scene in city pubs with drunken men stretched on the floor, I was at one of the Anti-Nazi League demonstrations in Lewisham in the late 1970s, I've been at street carnivals in Brixton and walked on seaside beaches with donkeys. So the photographs are familiar - there are no visual tricks here just a desire to show Britain as it was during the period. It is an honest view of the complexities of society in an age when themed photo-essays often replace complexity with message.
The photographs here are not judgemental but inclusive of diversity in all its aspects. The homeless and the poor have their places along with alfresco picnic at the Glynebourne Opera where cows have extra roles as ruminating food critics.
Alan Griffiths, June 2010
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