English
street photographs from the 1930s-1940s
“When
all is said and done, monotony may after all be the best condition for creation.”
Margaret Sackville
Of all the forms of commercial, domestic
photography practiced during the middle years of the last century, that which
belonged to the itinerant street photographer was the most diligent in its
ordinariness. Armed with a medium format camera, a flashgun, a fistful of
business cards and a resolute nerve, photographers took up position on
particular street corners, at either end of bridges and outside department
stores and fired away at passers-by. They cared nothing for the quality of
their images but worked with the confidence that most of their printed images
would look the same. Unlike studios for whom a painted backdrop or a style of
lighting could be a hallmark, these photographers were after the ultimate in
innocuity: they wanted their work to look just like everyone else’s.
The street photographers were pedestrian in
every sense of the word. They weren’t keen on photographing themselves so we
don’t have many images of them at work yet we imagine a kind of shabbiness: an
overcoat stained where passing traffic has thrown up mud, a tie that has become
loose as they jump out in front of people all day then chase them with their
cards and a hat picked up too many times from a grimy pavement. It was a job
that required a polite but tough edge. You couldn’t let passers-by pass you by
without getting them to pay for the photo. Once they had done that and received
the business card with the I.D number on it and the reminder to call by
tomorrow, it was time to chase after the next person. The lunch hours between
twelve and two would be especially hectic, as would be the end of the typical
workday around five or six. During both periods the population on the street
swelled but just as importantly the photographers were likely to catch a
customer in a good mood. What with
a steak pie and a couple of real ales under his belt a man would be more
willing to pay for a snap than if he was hungry or he had to hurry back to a
pile of paperwork.
All of these postcards come from Britain
though itinerant street photographers were found across the globe. Away from
London and the big cities they haunted the seaside towns, where again,
vacationers were likely to be in a good mood. Like climbing into the fake car
or putting your head through the hole above the painted female body, having
your photo taken on the pier or the promenade was probably one of those things
you did on a holiday at Margate or Blackpool.
The giveaway for itinerant walking pictures
is the number usually scratched on the negative but sometimes stamped on the
back. Prices varied but a standard three and a half by five inch postcard cost
around twelve shillings or (roughly) half a pound. Getting a group this large
together probably took some effort to organize but the pay-off was several
pounds in orders. My guess is that the photographers worked for commission. The
more they sold the more they were paid so a photo like this represented a small
coup.
We know the names of some of the companies
because the postcard carried their names stamped on the back. According to this
useful site, Walking Pictures,
walking photos were just one service the typical company offered along with
standard interior portraits, processing and printing and film and camera sales.
To paraphrase Keith Richards on his music: “Art was short for Arthur”.
Yet if thinking of these images as art is
frivolous we shouldn’t otherwise think of them as trivial. Like the actual
photographer, the people in the photos are usually anonymous but these belong
to the age of Mass Observation and the Recording Britain project, when
documenting British society in thorough detail was believed to be a valuable
research process for understanding how the nation’s future stood to unfold.
What we ended up with was a vast collective snapshot of Britain. Admittedly most
of the subjects are happy, there is really nothing to illuminate what was
troubling them or whether they even cared about the well-being of the nation,
but there are clues in the ways that people dress, their postures and in other
minor details that tell us not to trust the usual stereotypes.
Sometimes banality is so intense, the idea
or the image gets repeated so often that it passes through monotony and becomes
compelling. We can get this with these images, in the way they draw us into the
illusion that we are able to read something about the people or the society
from them. And then there is the statistic that there are so many millions of
them out there that surely their presence must amount to something worthwhile.
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| WALK DON'T RUN |
