Crane Kalman Brighton presents the exhibition Shirley Baker : ‘80s Faces.
Shirley Baker (1932 – 2014) was a British photographer, best known for her street photography and street portraits in working class areas of Greater Manchester. She is one of Britain’s most compelling yet underexposed social documentary photographers. Her street photography of working-class inner-city areas, taken from 1960 until 2000, would come to define her humanist vision.
Born in Kersal, North Salford, she took up photography at the age of eight when she and her twin sister were given Brownie cameras by an uncle. As a child she developed her first black and white film in the darkness of the coal shed. Her passion for photography continued and she went on to study Pure Photography at Manchester College of Technology, and do advanced courses at London College of Printing. In her sixties she completed an MA in Critical History and Theory of Photography at the University of Derby.
She is said to be one of few women in post-war Britain to receive formal photographic training. Upon graduating, she started working as an industrial photographer for fabric manufacturers Courtaulds before working as freelance photographer for other businesses and as a writer and photographer on various magazines, books and newspapers, including The Guardian.
Throughout the 1960s and 1970s she continuously photographed a range of humanist subjects, sparked by her amusement and curiosity of human character and behaviour, and a compassion for social injustice. However, it is her empathetic but unsentimental photographs of inner-city working-class communities in Salford and Manchester as they experienced years of ‘slum’ clearance that has come to define her distinct vision.
It was not until 1986 that her photographs would come to wider public attention with the exhibition Here Yesterday, and Gone Today at Salford Art Gallery, a collection of photographs that make visible the spectrum of human resilience within the working class communities of Salford and Manchester. Since then, Baker has had two books of her photographs published and had her works exhibited widely, including at The Photographer’s Gallery, The Barbican, Tate Britain and at The Lowry Centre.
Baker’s curiosity and engagement with the everyday world around her resulted in many different strands of work, many of which are yet to be exhibited, each of which confirms her acute observation, visual humour as well as compassion for the lives of ordinary people as distinctive in its exploration of post-war British culture.
“I love the immediacy of unposed, spontaneous photographs and the ability of the camera to capture the serious, the funny, the sublime and the ridiculous. Despite the many wonderful pictures of the great and famous, I feel that less formal, quotidian images can often convey more of the life and spirit of the time” – Shirley Baker
Shirley Baker : ‘80s Faces
14th March – 20th April 2025
The exhibition will be on show at the Viewing Room Online – https://cranekalmanbrighton.com/viewing-room/
Crane Kalman Brighton
132 New Church Road
Brighton BN3 4JD
www.cranekalmanbrighton.com
