INVISIBLE CITIES: THE PHOTOBOOKS SHOWCASING WORKING-CLASS STORIES
It was booker prize-winning author Douglas Stuart who famously said: “books were never seen as for people like us because they never contained people like us”. It’s a quote that chimes with photographers from similar working class backgrounds, working in the quiet backwaters of England today. Here stories are told with cameras, in thoughtful photobooks, about the worlds the photographers exist or have existed within, often forgotten and woefully neglected in funding from our consecutive neo-liberal Governments since 1979. Places like Stoke-on-Trent and Oldbury.
“I’m a big fan of photographer Robert Clayton” says the Paul Sng, curator of photobook Invisible Britain. “His images show the beauty of working class communities and depict council estates with love, care and empathy.”
Coincidently, Sng also produced Tish, a film recently shown on BBC iplayer about a working class photographer and single mum. Interest in working class photography like Sng’s and Clayton’s has enjoyed a renaissance this year – like the Bert Hardy exhibition at the Photographers’ Gallery; Leo Regan’s film My Friend Lanre, which charts the life of former Independent photographer Lanre Fehintola, and Johny Pitts’ After the End of History: British Working Class Photography 1989-2024 is touring.
Robert Clayton, currently touring his work in Pitt’s Southbank centre exhibition, began searching for a place to capture on camera on a drive around his homelands of the West Midlands and later turned his photographs into a book, about the Lion Farm Estate, simply titled Estate. It features a collection of photos of a place by the book’s title: high and low rise flats in Oldbury in the heart of Birmingham’s post-industrial wastelands. A picture of a church by a bus stop here is compelling. The estate was built when they built council estates with tower blocks, high rises, low rises, even bungalows for access – a row of shops, youth clubs, a church and bus links. Everything was built for the community, like a primary school and care home, says Clayton: “from cradle to grave everything was built for working class people.” It’s a place Clayton remembers with deep warmth which has now come of age.
These photobooks also exemplify not just care, love and empathy but also self-care, heartfelt living, a pride of home, says Invisible Britain contributor Joanne Coates who is also on display at the same Southbank show alongside Clayton. She says: “Dig where you stand! Make work from lived experience as growing up I saw my class represented only from exaggerated stereotypes. This can add to the harm done to working class communities and self perception.”
Stoke-based photographer and photobook publisher Daniel Lyttleton works under a similar umbrella and appreciates Sng’s Invisible Britain book, noting it as an important record of ordinary people: “It includes a good use of image and text to convey stories from real people. People not generally seen or celebrated in mainstream culture.”
Lyttleton’s own photography in his ‘Out of Place’ books reflects his peer review – all absorbing monochromes, grey hues and ghostly pastels unfold a post-industrial city forgotten and the daily mill of lives lived on the fringes.
It isn’t just the landscapes that pose unique subject matter. All these photographers use photobooks as a medium to produce affordable art for the people living in the places they capture. Invisible Britain contributor and photographer Joanne Coates: “It would still be largely inaccessible for someone like to me to even think about making a photobook. In 2024 if we call photobooks a democratic medium we need to explore who gets to make a photobook, who has access through wealth and personal connection. Paul Sng really did think about this, using a crowd-funded platform and thinking about how to make a more affordable piece that relates multiple stories.”
This storytelling as art comes from history, and family heritage, adds Lyttleton: “I make something from not much. From the place I exist. It’s in our DNA in Stoke. To look at the place I exist. To look and learn from first hand experience. The photographs are some kind of record of that experience but always secondary. What is between the photographs is always more.”
Like Coates and Sng, Lyttleton also agrees that affordability of his work is important – by a working class photographer from Stoke, for people from Stoke and beyond: “My books are affordable too, so they can be accessible from the people they were made about. I make photo books because I work in sequenced photographs mainly. They are a good way to disseminate your work to an audience.”
Often deeply emotive, personal and sometimes calm, it’s a counter-narrative for the art world, away from the main-stray of brightly lit capital cities. Of his photobooks, Lyttleton says: “I don’t make photographs for an audience in mind. Whether they resonate with folk or not, I believe in the value of my work, how it is used in any other way is not for me to decide. I do have collections in the local archives, it’s social history I suppose. The way we are. My practice has lead to other community initiatives here in Stoke.”
Of Robert Clayton’s work, a similar review from Lyttleton alludes to records in time and artwork for the archives: “It’s a great record of the social landscape of a place somewhat familiar to me and also alien at the same time. I didn’t grow up in the tower blocks but I was in close proximity to them. His work reveals a sense of community I think. Hope too. It’s the layers that interest me. The details of the places. The tiles on the pub. The graffiti on concrete.”
The Invisible Britain book is made differently to Lyttleton and Clayton’s solo ventures as it is produced and curated by Sng collaboratively with participants and photographers. But there’s a mutual respect and appreciation of photographs among peers working in the genre past and present. Working class icon Ken Loach is a fan of Sng’s work – across all the areas (Sng also directors films of similar themes).
As an older photographer starting out in 1990 does Robert Clayton consider himself a pioneer? “In my 20s, I didn’t see myself as that – I saw myself as a young person with ideas and wanted to make an effort to make pictures that were absorbing and interesting. Henri Cartier Bresson coined the term “the decisive moment” – when a photo might come alive that adds extra feel. I tried to capture moments like that and simultaneously show the world my reality and my way of living that was rarely shown. I was not aware at the time of my contemporaries who were photographing their own working class environments, such as Richard Billingham and Nick Waplington, to name two, but did discover their work a few years later.” says Clayton from his home in London, adding: “My need to show this comes from my background growing up on tough estate in Worcester but I felt my class wasn’t represented and I wanted to capture something fair and honest about where I was coming from.”
Notably, feted fashion photographer Jamie Hawkesworth rose to international success after a series of photos he took of a bus station in Preston. I wonder what photographers like Lyttleton make of his Hawkesworth and his success? Lyttleton says: “I like his work. He has his own aesthetic. He’s looking for the best in people.”
Seeing the best in others, empathy, is equally important to all the photographers I spoke to, as well as representation. Says Invisible Britain photographer, Coates: “Being part of Invisible Britain, and the book itself was an experience that made me realise my voice matters. Working class people shouldn’t just be the subject, their stories matter. The UK can be an extraordinary place full of extraordinary people, this book shows the diversity, the strength and hidden elements of these people.”
Erica Crompton
INVISIBLE CITIES: THE PHOTOBOOKS SHOWCASING WORKING-CLASS STORIES
For more info:
Lyttleton’s Out of Place books Out of Place Books
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