In Your Face
An overlooked body of work, ‘In Your Face’ features portraits shot at close range highlighting the differences between Brick Lane and London’s financial district in the 1980s, as Tracy Calder reveals
‘In Your Face’ runs at the Martin Parr Foundation, Bristol, until 22 December 2018. The Foundation is open to the public from Wednesday to Saturday, 11am to 6pm. For more details visit www. martin parr foundation.org.
During the 1970s Paul Trevor spent much of his time drinking tea, sleeping on sofas and photographing strangers. Having abandoned his job as an accountant at the age of 25 he, along with Nicholas Battye, Diane Olson and Alex Slotzkin, co-founded the Exit Photography Group. Each of the members had a keen interest in social issues in the UK, and in 1974 they produced a small booklet Down Wapping, a portrait of London’s last dock community. Soon afterwards Slotzkin left the group and Chris Steele-Perkins joined it, having responded to an advert for new members that he saw pinned to a wall in The Photographers’ Gallery.
The group met at Paul Trevor’s flat off Brick Lane. ‘Paul was clearly the organiser and explained they wanted to go beyond Down Wapping and look at the larger issue of inner-city poverty across Britain,’ recalls Steele-Perkins in an article for photoworks. ‘They were ambitious and serious and had shown, with Down Wapping, that they finished what they started.’ Despite funding from the Gulbenkian Foundation, money was tight and the group (minus Olson who had left by then) lived on the margins of poverty while they worked on the project. Drawing inspiration from Walker Evans’s and James Agee’s classic book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men they set out to prove that inner- city poverty was endemic, and had the potential to lead to significant social disorder. At the time, everyone in the group lived in London, so it seemed only natural that their quest should begin in England’s capital.
They also covered Glasgow as a collective, but after that they divided the UK up between them: Paul Trevor went to stay in Liverpool, Battye covered Birmingham, and Steele- Perkins went to Newcastle, Middlesbrough and Belfast. ‘ We made contact with community organisations in search of contacts, we also did a lot of walking around deprived districts, talking to people in the street, knocking on doors,’ says Steele- Perkins. Aside from taking pictures, the team also
interviewed their subjects, vowing to give text and images equal billing in any book they might produce. In 1982 (seven years after the project began) their ambition was realised when Open University Press published Survival Programmes: In Britain’s Inner Cities.
While working for the group, Paul Trevor took some experimental pictures of people going about their daily business in Brick Lane market in London. A departure from his usual style, these were shot at close range, revealing every crease, patch of stubble and fold of fabric. This is an approach we are familiar with today, thanks to street photographer Bruce Gilden, but these images, while intrusive, have none of the colour or cruelty of Gilden’s work. Paul Trevor returned to this ‘in your face’ project in the 1980s, only this time he decided to focus on two locations: Brick Lane and the City’s financial district a mile or so away. The people he encountered in each location were noticeably different: in the financial district a young man clutches a bloodied handkerchief to his nose (we can only speculate as to its cause), while in Brick Lane a young boy is having his nostrils tugged by an older man (perhaps his father) for some misdemeanour we’re not privy to. ‘ The idea was to say something about the two places without having to show what people did,’ says Paul Trevor. ‘It was shot during the Thatcher years which had polarised debate on market values versus community values.’
The Martin Parr Foundation in Bristol is the perfect place to showcase this series. When Parr established the studio, gallery, library and archive in 2014, he made it clear that he intended to champion overlooked bodies of work, and ‘In Your Face’ is a prime example. The exhibition features more than 50 images from the series, and marks the first time the project has been exhibited in nearly 25 years.