Shirley Baker

Shirley Baker was born in Salford in 1932, the daughter of a factory worker in one of the great industrial cities of northern England. She grew up in the terraced streets and back-to-back houses that would later become the central subjects of her photographic work, and she never lost the intimate knowledge of working-class life that her upbringing had given her. She studied at the Manchester School of Art in the early 1950s, one of the few women in the photography programme, and began taking photographs of the streets around her home almost immediately after graduating. What she found there — children playing on cobblestones, women gossiping on doorsteps, families carrying on their lives against a backdrop of soot-blackened terraces and crumbling brickwork — would occupy her for the next four decades.

Baker's photographs of Manchester and Salford in the 1960s and 1970s constitute one of the most important visual records of post-war urban Britain. She documented the great slum clearances that swept through the industrial North during this period, when entire neighbourhoods of Victorian terraced housing were demolished to make way for tower blocks and ring roads. Where official photographers and journalists tended to focus on the squalor of the condemned streets — the broken windows, the outdoor lavatories, the damp and the grime — Baker saw something different. She saw the communities that inhabited these places, the networks of mutual support and shared experience that had developed over generations, and she understood that what was being demolished was not merely housing but a way of life.

Her images from this period are remarkable for their warmth and their refusal to patronise. Children play with improvised toys in streets strewn with rubble; women lean against doorframes with expressions of weary amusement; old men sit on low walls watching the world go by. There is poverty in these photographs, certainly, but there is also dignity, humour, and an unmistakeable sense of belonging. Baker photographed her subjects not as victims of deprivation but as people fully engaged in the business of living, and this distinction gives her work a humanity that sets it apart from much of the social documentary photography of the period.

Baker was also one of the earliest British photographers to work seriously in colour. Her colour images of Manchester and Salford from the late 1960s and 1970s — often showing the garish signage of new shops against the grey stone of Victorian buildings, or the bright clothing of children against the sombre backdrop of demolition sites — add a dimension to her documentary record that black-and-white alone could not provide. The colour work has been increasingly recognised in recent years as pioneering, anticipating by a decade or more the colour documentary photography that would become dominant in the 1980s and 1990s.

Despite the quality and consistency of her output, Baker received relatively little recognition during her working life. She was a woman working in a field dominated by men, and she photographed subjects — working-class women, children, domestic life — that were often considered peripheral to the main concerns of documentary photography. She exhibited occasionally and published her work in local newspapers and magazines, but she never achieved the national or international profile that her male contemporaries enjoyed. It was not until the 2000s, when her archive was rediscovered and championed by curators and publishers, that her work began to receive the attention it deserved.

The publication of Shirley Baker: Women and Children; and Loitering Men in 2015, a year after her death, brought her photographs to a wide audience for the first time. The book was acclaimed as a revelation, and Baker was posthumously recognised as one of the most significant street photographers to have worked in Britain in the second half of the twentieth century. Her images are now held in major public collections, and exhibitions of her work continue to draw audiences who find in her photographs not only a record of a vanished world but a model of how to look at ordinary life with attention, empathy, and respect.