Shirley Baker "Streets of Manchester"
By Billy Kung
It is a shame that in spite of the technological advances made in the area of hand-held cameras in the early to mid-20th century, it did not lead to more women taking up the art form, especially in the field of documentary photography. British photographer Shirley Baker, who passed away in September 2014 at age 82, was one of the rare female documentarians that captured street scenes of Manchester, particularly those from the city’s crumbling working class districts that were targeted for urban renewal. Currently on view at the Photographers’ Gallery in London, is the exhibition “Women, Children and Loitering Men” (7/17–9/20), which focuses on Baker’s depictions of the government-initiative clearance programs of inner-city Manchester and the city of Salford, of Greater Manchester, between 1961 and 1981.
The tightly packed terraces that became Manchester’s slums were built in the 19th century to house the workers who powered the looms and engines during the Industrial Revolution. By the end of World War II, the slum clearances—that first began in the 1930s—aggresively resumed and roughly 1.3 million homes were torn down nationwide between 1955 and 1975.
