Shirley baker photography biography

The University of Manchester Library has recently acquired a body of work by the Manchester photographer Shirley Baker (9 July 1932 – 21 September 2014).  A British photographer of great skill, best known for her social documentary street photographs, especially of working-class, inner-city areas of Greater Manchester.  Her distinctive photography shows an engagement with the everyday and a compassion for the human condition encompassing the huge social changes of the 1950s onwards.

Shirley Baker was born in Kersal, North Salford.  Her childhood passion for photography led her to study Pure Photography at Manchester College of Technology and she later went on to do courses at London Regent Street Polytechnic and London College of Printing.  She is credited with being one of a handful of women in post-war Britain to receive formal photographic training.  Shirley became a lecturer at Salford College of Art and Manchester Polytechnic, now Manchester Metropolitan University.  However, she returned to her first love of freelance photography, which gave her the freedom and ‘time to observe, making her own pictures, resulting in collections of photographs that explore British society in transition following World War II and leading up to the more materialistic 1990s.’[1]

Our examples are of Shirley’s ‘street photography’; a genre of photography that records everyday life in a public place, depict children at play outside their homes or on the streets where they lived. They show children absorbed in the moment, capturing their enjoyment and their intent on their games. The children appear unstaged and natural, maybe ignorant of the fact that they are central to the photograph.  Much of her work from this time specifically focuses on depictions of the urban clearance programmes of inner-city Manchester and Salford. The period spanning 1961 – 1981 saw her work highlight what many saw as the needless destruction of working-class communities.  Her i

Shirley Baker developed her first photograph as a young girl. She became one of Britain’s most definitive, yet overlooked, social documentary photographers.

This event celebrates the publication of a new book of work. It combines Shirley Baker’s street photographs of Greater Manchester with unseen works. These unseen photos span the UK, South of France, Italy and Japan. The special panel includes Lou Stoppard, Sabina Jaskot-Gill and John van Aitken.

Shirley Baker is published by MACK.

This event is in collaboration with MACK.

Biographies

Lou Stoppard

Lou Stoppard is a writer and curator. She has curated a range of photography and style exhibitions. These include: Mad About The Boy, at Fashion Space Gallery and North: Fashioning Identity, at Open Eye Gallery, Somerset House and The Civic. She is the writer and editor of Shirley Baker.

Sabina Jaskot-Gill

Sabina Jaskot-Gill is Curator of Photographs at the National Portrait Gallery. Sabina lectured on the history of photography and photographic theory at Sotheby’s Institute of Art. She held positions at the University for the Creative Arts and Autograph ABP.

John van Aitken

John van Aitken is a photographer and Principal Lecturer in Media at University of Central Lancashire. His current work The New Salford documents housing developments. Shirley Baker also photographed this area in the 1960s. In 2004 John formed the Institute of Urban Dreaming with writer Jane Brake.

publications

Street Photographs: Manchester and Salford. Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1989. 

Streets and Spaces: Urban Photography – Salford and Manchester – 1960s–2000. Salford: The Lowry, 2000. 
Women and Children; and Loitering Men. London: The Photographers' Gallery, 2015. Edited by Anna Douglas. 
Shirley Baker. London: Mack, 2019. Edited by Lou Stoppard.

zines

Punks 1980s. Southport: Café Royal, 2018; 2020.
British Seaside 1960–1970. Southport: Café Royal, 2018; 2020.
Manchester and Salford Children in the 1960s. Southport: Café Royal, 2018.

Manchester and Salford on Holiday in the 1960s. Southport: Café Royal, 2018.

 “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

Born in Kersal, Lancashire in 1932, Baker is today recognized as one of the preeminent British photographers of the post war period, and one of a very small number of women street photographer in post-war England.

Beginning her work in the late 1950s her pictures reveal the legacy of Bill Brandt's pioneering study of The English at Home (1938) and the Picture Post magazine photo stories of Bert Hardy, Grace Robertson, Thurston Hopkins and others. Based in the streets of Manchester and Salford, Baker's photographs also provide a northern counterpart for the type of street photography practised in London at the same period by Roger Mayne, which also saw a focus on children. However Baker's photography has a particular, individual quality that distinguishes her work and her sensitivity to her subjects.

After studying photography at Manchester College of Technology, Baker initially pursued a career as photographer at the Guardian. This proved difficult at a time when photography was considered a job limited to men. In 1960 Baker began teaching at Salford College of Art, during this time she started documenting the urban clearance programmes of inner-city Manchester and Salford.

Baker's humanist documentary work allows an intimate look on the daily life of working class communities during the 1960s and up to the late 1970s. The black and white images find their visual power in the layers of their composition. The juxtaposition between the half-demolished grim backgrounds and the subject matter, mostly children playing and women daily life, allow an emphatic engagement. T