Vivid Colour Photos of the East End in the 1960s

Representations of the East End of London tend to usually rest on a series of half-truths, cliche and myth.

Some centre on Dickensian visions of chippy Cockneys – a world of ribald pubs, formidable matriarchs and heavy industry at the docks, barely updated in the popular imagination since the 19th century. Or it's visions of unalloyed grimness and decay. Dark streets housing despicable secrets, or just endless workaday misery. Lawless high rises and decayed terraces. An interconnected set of places linked by darkness and despair, and later attempts at urban renewal gone wrong.

While both ideas are hardly teeming with nuance, they've made for rich images since the birth of photography as an art form. From the work of German interwar world war photographer Bill Brandt, through the 21st century, the East End has been fertile ground for photographers looking to document and capture the essence of an area that seems to exist in a perpetual state of rapid fire change.

Yet few collections are as vital, natural or subtle as new book The East End in Colour: 1960-1980, by David Garnick. You'd be forgiven for being unfamiliar with the name, as the Stepney-born photographer died unknown in 1980 and was un-exhibited until now, his work stumbled upon by photographer Chris Dorley-Brown – of "Drivers In The 1980s" – in the Tower Hamlets photo archive.

The resulting book and exhibition (running at the archives until the 10th of May) is an intimate look at an East End now mostly vanished, caught between the deindustrialisation of the latter half of the 20th century and providing little hint at the coming booms of gentrification and wide scale social change that we see today. I got in touch with Chris to discuss his remarkable discovery and its unexpected success and contemporary resonance.

VICE: Can you talk me through the actual process of discovering these photos? From what I’ve read it was semi-accidental in that you came across this vast trove of Garnick's undiscovered work when researching something entirely different?
Chris Dorley-Brown: Yes, it was like finding treasure. I’d been working on another photographic project with the Tower Hamlets Archive for a couple of years, and they knew that I was interested in historical uses of colour. You find that its use in photography pre-1980 is fairly rare in the independent documentary world, if that makes sense. Even though many people had access to it and used it, perhaps on holiday, or were obviously familiar through other avenues like advertising, it wasn’t quite the same for photographers interested in documentary or showing political and personal perspective. They’d usually work in black and white because it was cheaper and they could control production through the use of dark rooms and other similar avenues.

It was almost impossible to print from colour in a personal capacity, and at best a very long winded, unsatisfactory process. So work like Garnick's was something I’d been hopeful for, and interested in, for a long time.

Considering the volume of what was uncovered, did you encounter any problems in ordering and sifting through the sheer weight of material?
It was difficult to start with. The archive didn’t really have the equipment to have a look at what was on the photographs. By holding them up to the light you could sort of see they were of Tower Hamlets, but it was extremely difficult to tell how interesting, or of what quality, they were. So they asked me to come and lend a hand in assessing them. There was one particular collection that you could quickly see were very beautifully composed and put together photos, and from an era [the 1960s onwards] that had a particular personal resonance for me, as they were just before the time that I started photographing things myself.

I suggested to them that I make a selection and get on with some scanning. And that’s what I did, while setting myself up a desk and registering as a volunteer so I could work in the archive in an official capacity. Then it was a matter of selecting about 300 images from around 1,800 scans. During that time we went to see Hoxton Mini Press to gauge interest in the project, and they went completely mad over them. Then I knew that we'd found something of worth. And that’s how the book and the exhibition came about.

The reception of it has taken everyone completely by surprise. It’s been the most popular in terms of visitor numbers of any exhibition they’ve ever had at the archives.

It was really noticeable at the exhibition, how slightly older people were enthralled by the images of places they'd have known well in their youth. A basic point, but do you think colour adds to that sense of immediacy?
Well, with black and white you can sometimes find a sense of surface nostalgia. The vividness of the colour maybe does feel more real to people and the sense of their own memories. Because they were shot in a Kodachrome, an early film which has now been discontinued, the tones stay extremely stable, which means they haven't faded. There's something extremely evocative about them, and you can go as far as saying that they almost look like the colour of memory: we all tend to remember the sunny rather than the grey.

Granick’s biography is pretty scant. Do you know much about his life?
There's very little about his life, actually. As for the images, there's very little that is showy or fancy about them. They're recordings of a place and a time. It's like peering through a window and being granted access to the era of flux they document. Even though some of the buildings remain, you're talking about a completely different vibe. I think these images are showing us what we've lost. There's an attitude to these images that is very low-key and a spirit, even a ghost, of what has disappeared.

We also have to remember that he wasn't a professional, but an enthusiastic local amateur, which gave him the benefit of knowledge about certain things that only a local would know. The right time to catch light, or a certain scene. Things that maybe a professional couldn't do.

It's interesting in the wider context of visual representations of the East End. A lot of the famous images, like Bill Brandt’s from an earlier era, are beautiful and artful, but they maybe lack that really un-staged warmth that you get from Granick. Is that to do with the distinction between hobbyist and professional?
It’s good that you brought up Bill Brandt. His East End photos have a very "London attitude" to them, but we only recently found out that he'd staged a lot of those pictures. For instance, the famous one of the guy in the pub is his brother and not some old geezer. Because he was working with actors he felt able to manipulate the images. Because if he was just to have walked into a pub – a posh guy with a German accent – then he probably wouldn't have got an authentic response from the locals. They would have fucked with him, basically.

I really love his work, and when I think of London during the Blitz I think about these images, as the attitude seems so correct, even if they're set up. Maybe there's also this thing about people fresh to London who come and hit the nail on the head more than those who have never had any cause to leave.

That's something I thought with the Granick photos. They do sort of challenge the cliches of the East End as this eternally chipper, sunny spirited place. They aren't welcoming scenes in the photos. Things look a bit pinched and harsh, I suppose reflecting the era they were shot in.
Yes, the images show an East End that seems trapped 20 years in the past from when they were composed. Don't forget there were lots of interesting things going during the time. A number of artists grew up there at the same period who went on to make very interesting realist visual works. I'm thinking about the various films and plays on the exact same territory and at the exact same time that Granick was out making his work. And they both reflect questions about class and race. This is conjecture, but it's possible that Garnick felt an outsider because of Jewishness. It doesn't matter if you've been born and grown up in a place, you can still retain that feeling of isolation and otherness.

Thanks, Chris.

@DrLimes99

Images used courtesy of the Tower Hamlets Archive. The East End in Colour 1960-1980 by David Granick is published by Hoxton Mini Press.