picture by Shirley Baker, from the Mary Evans Picture Library (taken around Manchester in the sixties)
from vintage photo
I quite like her photos of children at play in the streets. More on this from the Photographer’s gallery…
Shirley Baker was born in Kersal, North Salford, and moved to Manchester at the age of two. Her photography began in the early sixties with a compulsion to record “the face of a people at a time when their homes were being demolished and they were being uprooted due to a huge ‘slum’ clearance programme.” Baker captured, with a particular Northern nostalgia, a bygone era of community sprit and street life.
Thus the adults of the community wear the expression of good nature but carry the burden of a time of immense change. However “The children saw things differently,” Shirley Baker wrote, “for to them it was a giant playground with untold treasure hidden amongst the junk and rubble.”
