Iconic photos of city slums come home for exhibition

SHE roamed the back streets, recording real life in the slums of Salford and Manchester.

The result were iconic images of people in urban landscapes which were on the brink of being swept away.

Now the photographs taken by Shirley Baker are coming home after a successful exhibition in London.

Manchester Art Gallery will present ‘Women and Children: and Loitering Men,’ a series of pictures which capture the feisty community spirit in the twin cities during the clearance of hundreds of terraced streets from 1960 to 1980.

It will be staged between May and July.

A Shirley Baker Open Day is being staged at the gallery today between 11am and 4pm and on March 18 from 11am to 1pm and people are invited to contribute to the audio guide.

It is hoped to put voices to the images by tracking down those who lived or worked in, or visited those streets during the era. The public are being asked to help create an oral history to complement Baker’s photographs.

And on March 27 one-to-one interviews will be recorded at the gallery.

Baker’s work captures communities under siege from clearance programmes – children playing on vast levelled wastelands, rubbish heaps and back alleys.

Groups of mothers feature strongly as well as the games children played - such as skipping and hop-scotch.

Baker, who was born in Kersal, Salford, but moved as a two-yearold to Manchester, photographed Ordsall and the docks and the Hanky Park area of Salford.

In Manchester, streets either side of Upper Brook Street, All Saints, Hulme, Greenheys and Moss Side.

Baker died in 2014, aged 82, but spoke of her street photography,

She said: “Whole streets were disappearing and I hoped to capture some trace of everyday life of the people who lived there.

“I was particularly interested in the more mundane, even trivial aspects of life that were not being recorded by anyone else – rather than the more organised and official activities, such as Whit Walks, that were documented each year by the local press.

“I never posed people in my pictures, but sometimes the children posed themselves when they spotted the camera.

“I liked to photograph their spontaneous reactions.”

The gallery has selected a series of colour photographs that have never been exhibited, remaining in Baker’s archive since 1965, as well as her black and white images.

Baker studied Pure Photography at Manchester College of Technology.

Her first book ‘Street Photographs: Manchester and Salford’ was published in 1989, and she had solo exhibitions in 2012 in Oldham and Salford.