Bob Mazzer’s photographs capturing shadowy scenes from the London Underground in the 1970s and ‘80s caused a sensation when a selection were first published on local blog Spitalfields Life last summer.
Now, following international acclaim, the Howard Griffin Gallery in Shoreditch presents Mazzer’s debut solo exhibition and a new photobook published by Spitalfields Life showcasing his work documenting the sprawling commuter network.
“Talking about the exhibition and the book I realised that demand was coming from the people on blogs and Facebook, not so much the art market,” Mazzer says.
“It has been really gratifying because that’s who I did the work for really, the man in the street. The internet is a very democratic beast.”
Aldgate-born Mazzer’s first camera was an Ilford Sporty celebrating his Bar Mitzvah at the age of 13 and he has his art teacher to thank for opening a darkroom at Woodberry Down Comprehensive and inspiring him to attend Saturday Art Club at the Hornsey College of Art.
“I suppose it was quite an avant-garde thing to do then, having a darkroom in school in the mid-1960s,” Mazzer says.
“I’ll always remember Euan Duff, a great photojournalist, turning up in his Land Rover and stomping around the darkroom swearing.
“You had the likes of Terence Donovan and David Bailey doing their thing on the fashion scene and then you had Don McCullin and Tony Ray-Jones who were really doing incredible stuff pushing the boundaries of the documentary genre.”
Mazzer eventually left London to go live on a hilltop in rural Wales “with a bunch of freaks and hippies being happy artists” before returning to live in Wood Green after the death of his mother.
Finding a job as a projectionist in a porn cinema called The Office in King’s Cross, Mazzer instinctively began shooting scenes from his late-night commutes.
“I was always looking for unusual, quirky or funny stuff, that moment of recognition between two strangers, and it turned out to be this unwitting social history, a record that no one else had,” he explains.
From wild-haired punks to chain-smoking City suits and weary tourists, Mazzer’s images of an altogether gloomier and grubbier London Underground certainly stand in stark contrast to today’s strip-lit, security-conscious operation.
“Young people are always so surprised that we used to be able to smoke on the Tube,” Mazzer says.
“It’s a different world now I guess, with everyone plugged into their iPhones and iPads. Having said that, I still find it a very relaxed, cosmopolitan, egalitarian space. There’s social harmony there –
despite the odd bomb.”
Bob Mazzer: Underground is at Howard Griffin Gallery, 189 Shoreditch High Street, E1 6HU until 13 July.
Born in Kampala, Uganda in 1965, photographer Zed Nelson moved with his family to East London at the age of four after dictator Idi Amin came to power and the situation became increasingly untenable for his parents, both journalists. Nelson’s career as an award-winning photojournalist took a different turn when the car he was travelling in was ambushed while on assignment in Kabul, Afghanistan. Turning his lens to what he describes as the “fault-lines in Western society”, he’s produced critically-acclaimed projects covering issues such as gun culture in America and cosmetic surgery. This month sees the release of A Portrait of Hackney, Nelson’s latest photobook documenting the ever-changing face of area.
When did you move to London and what was it like for you moving from an entirely different continent and culture?
I was only four years old when my family moved back to London from Uganda. Idi Amin had come to power and my father was arrested and dragged out of bed in the middle of the night and taken away. He was editor of a newspaper in the capital, Kampala. He was released unharmed, but it was time to leave. I don’t remember the transition to be honest, at that age things just happen.
You have talked about the period after your car was ambushed in Kabul and coming home to news of the Dunblane massacre changing the direction of your career as a photographer. Can you explain more about the significance of that?
As a young photographer I had been driven by an idealistic notion of ‘saving the world’, of shining a light on important and ignored issues. This often led me to focus on the ‘developing world’ – on war, conflict, and human-rights issues. But, over the years, I had increasing concerns that instead of ‘saving the world’ I might actually be reinforcing racial stereotypes. It also became clear to me that the media in which my work was reproduced was unwilling to deal with the complexity of the issues. A turning point in my career came when I was involved in a car ambush in Afghanistan in which a friend and my interpreter were both shot and horribly injured.
After several years of photographing some of the most troubled and conflict-torn areas in the developing world, I was already getting sick of photographing young men killing each other in foreign countries with guns supplied by our own governments. I returned to the UK and turned on the TV to see the Dunblane massacre – Britain’s first deadly school shooting rampage in which 16 children were killed.
I decided it was time to focus closer to home, to reflect on the problems and fault-lines in Western society, and to work on a long-term project where I could work to my own rules. Gun Nation explored the paradox of why America’s most potent symbol of freedom is also one of its greatest killers – resulting in an annual death toll of over 30,000 American citizens. That project was an attempt to show the power of the commercial gun industry in the USA, and to question the realities of America’s gun culture.
“I decided it was time to focus closer to home” – portrait of Zed Nelson. Courtesy of Zed Nelson
In comparison to other projects such as Love Me, Gun Nation and In This Land, A Portrait of Hackney has a very different feel and scope. What interests you about this particular patch of London?
Hackney is a personal project undertaken for no reason other than to remember what it was like to just wander the streets and photograph, to explore and think. I’d been travelling for years, working on quite serious subjects, and I had largely ignored my own country and my own neighbourhood.
I have lived in Hackney all my life. It’s where I went to school, learnt to ride a bike. It was always shabby, and in many ways represented a place to get away from. But it’s changing, and by taking the time to see it I kind of fell in love with the area. The images are a kind of meditation on the confusion of cultures, clash of identities and the beauty and ugliness that co-exist in the borough today.
Can you tell me a bit about how and why you first started photographing Hackney?
Hackney suddenly seemed very alive – crazy and absurd. It was always poor – one of the poorest boroughs in London – but suddenly it became trendy. One day I laughed out loud pedalling home on my bike. Passing someone sporting a crazy ‘look’. I thought, I must document this moment.
Berries by Zed Nelson
What story does A Portrait of Hackney tell?
To try and make ‘sense’ of the place seems futile. Hackney is a socially, ethnically diverse melée. It has violence, beauty, wildlife, concrete wastelands, poverty and affluence jumbled together, vying for space. It is tattered and fractured, but very alive. But I am watching with fascination as the area goes through a metamorphosis – and witnessing an extraordinary contemporary social situation develop in the borough, where fashionable young hipsters, yuppie developments and organic cafés co-exist awkwardly with Hackney’s most under-privileged.
The social landscape for an under-privileged teenager growing up in Hackney is a million light-years away from the new urban hipsters who frequent the cool bars and expensive cappuccino cafés springing up in the same streets. These worlds co-exist side-by-side but entirely separate, creating bizarre juxtapositions of wealth and poverty, aspiration and hopelessness. There is a story of gentrification going on here. And it raises difficult questions that are hard to answer – is it good, or bad? I think people have a way of ‘unseeing’ things – which allows us to ignore that which does not directly affect our own lives.
How do you feel about how Hackney is changing – the rampant pace of gentrification, for example?
I enjoy Hackney today more than I ever have. But I also watch with a growing concern for its identity. As the property developers move in and gated luxury apartments spring up on every street corner you have to wonder how will it end? There’s a reoccurring motif in my images of Hackney, of cracked pavements and walls, melting tarmac and weeds and roots bursting through concrete. It’s as if nature is trying to reclaim the land, and Hackney – under-funded, neglected and poorly maintained – is constantly being sucked back into the earth. It amuses me to see this, as I find other, wealthier areas where nature has been conquered depressing and disconcerting – covered over in tarmac, cemented and de-weeded. I hope the property developers don’t win.
Display Boards from Stephen Willats’ project work Inside An Ocean during the 1979 exhibition Concerning Our Present Way of Living. Photograph courtesy of Stephen Willats
Since the French art critic and curator Nicolas Bourriaud coined the term ‘relational aesthetics’ to describe an artistic practice centred on human interaction and experience in the late 1990s, a great deal of traction has been given to the idea of artworks as models for living and action.
In many ways London-born conceptual artist Stephen Willats was way ahead of the game. He studied at the Ealing School of Art in the early 1960s and, influenced by cybernetics and the science of communication, became a pioneer of collaborative, socially-engaged art created in site-specific contexts.
Commissioned to produce a solo show for the Whitechapel Gallery in 1979, Willats involved people from the local area, initiating projects with leather and textile workers from in and around Brick Lane, labourers at the West India Dock and residents from the Ocean housing estate in Tower Hamlets.
Twenty-five years on, Willats’ exhibition is being revisited in a new archive display at the Whitechapel featuring works on loan from the Tate, the Middlesborough Institute of Modern Art and the Museum of London alongside documentary material from the artist’s personal archive.
“Willats always imagined the artist’s role as a social and political one and the archive display is a chance to reflect on an early example of an artist engaging with the local community,” says exhibition curator Nayia Yiakoumaki.
Part of the new archive display is dedicated to Willats’ work with residents on the Ocean housing estate, including a series of tape recordings and diagrams produced by Willats reflecting how people felt about their living conditions, from damp-ridden walls to the lack of facilities for children.
Now the subject of a £200m programme of regeneration works carried out by the East Thames Consortium, the archive display at the Whitechapel Gallery opens a window on the history of the community on the Ocean Estate, one of the oldest, largest and most impoverished in the country.
“In one sense there’s the art historical element to the archive exhibition, the chance reexamining of an early example of community engaged artistic practice pioneered by Willats in the more recent context of relational aesthetics,” Yiakoumaki says.
“On the other hand it presents a slice of history contrasting the very different reality of the East End amid financial crisis in the seventies with the here and now, something which I think newer residents to the area forget.”
Stephen Willats: Concerning Our Present Way of Living is at Whitechapel Gallery until 14 September. 77-82 Whitechapel High St, E1 7QX
Kleine Sonne (Little Son), 1969, collage by Hannah Hoch. Courtesy of Landsbank Berlin AG
Looking at the clamorous photomontages of Hannah Höch is always a slightly overwhelming – albeit eye-opening – experience.
Here the viewer is tasked with navigating visual planes littered with references to everything from heads of state and showgirls to lipstick, finance and fatherhood culled from the popular press.
Born in the German town of Gotha in 1889, Höch learnt her trade as an artist in Berlin where, in 1919, she joined her then partner Raoul Hausmann, as well as George Grosz, John Heartfield and Johannes Baader in becoming a member of the left-wing, avant-garde Berlin Dada Group.
In the incendiary interwar years, Höch’s carefully crafted works cut a metaphorical knife through the dizzying contradictions of rampant consumer culture, bloated German militarism and the ambiguous role of women.
A new exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery is dedicated to her career, spanning six tumultuous decades from the 1910s to the 1970s. It is the first major retrospective of Höch’s work in the UK and a testament to the current groundswell of interest in this most intriguing of creative forces.
“I think she was an artist who truly realised the political and poetical potential of images, what I would call the further realms of images as a counter-cultural force,” says exhibition co-curator Daniel Herrmann.
“Her rambunctious spirit and rebellious nature saw her produce acerbic, socially and politically engaged imagery, transforming the means of working with collages, abstraction, materiality and challenging the construction of beauty.”
Höch combined new modes of seeing such as aerial photography and microscopy with embroidery patterns and snippets from trashy magazines to dissect the much-hyped construct of the sexually liberated, working ‘New Woman’ of the Weimar Republic.
It is perhaps her uncanny ability to expose the ironies behind the subtle (and not so subtle) manipulation of images of women for various commercial and political ends – served, albeit, with a thick slice of ambivalence – that strikes with such poignancy today.
Take for example her short essay The Painter (c.1920), a wonderfully witty take-down of the myth of the male artist genius involving an abstract painting, a row about whose turn it is to wash the dishes and a bunch of chives.
In her most famous work, Cut with the Kitchen Knife through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany (1919-20), there are cut-out words from newspapers among the wheels and cogs of the slick new machine culture alongside dislocated pieces of architecture and animals.
Look closely and you’ll find Marx and Lenin and a tiny map of Europe illustrating countries where women had the right vote. At the centre of it all, the decapitated body of dancer Niddy Impekoven pirouettes elegantly beneath the floating head of artist Käthe Kollwitz.
In High Finance (1923), a double-barrel shotgun, the black, white and red flag of the German Reich and English chemist John Herschel are deployed to critique the relationship between financiers and the military in a disastrous period of economic crisis.
More than most, Höch was acutely aware of the painful gap between public rhetoric and private reality.
During the Second World War, Höch was blacklisted by the Nazis who included her work in the notorious Degenerate Art Exhibition in Munich in 1937. Höch survived the war by retreating to a remote house on the outskirts of Berlin and a period of “lyrical abstraction”.
Höch continued to produce works until her death in 1978 and the exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery offers a rare chance to get up close with over 100 collages, photomontages, watercolours and woodcuts from various stages of her career, examples of which are, sadly, so few and far between in British collections.
Hannah Höch is at the Whitechapel Gallery, 77-82 Whitechapel High Street, E1 7QX from 15 January – 23 March
It’s hard to imagine now just how different a landscape the decaying industrial wasteland of London’s East End presented in the early 1970s through the murky veil of economic recession.
Here, among dormant factories, rotting riverside warehouses and boarded-up houses, a group of art school grads led by Jonathan Harvey and David Panton found their future.
“When we approached the Greater London Council for property they said you can squat, because there was a huge amount of squatting going on then, in which case we’ll get you out, or go away and form yourself into a housing association that will give you the legal structure to have a conversation with us,” Harvey recalls at his top-floor office in Mile End.
So in November 1972 seven founder members scraped together £10 apiece to form the artist-led charitable Acme Housing Association Ltd.
The GLC initially transferred two derelict shops on Devons Road in Bow. By December 1974, Acme was managing 76 houses, providing living and studio space for 90 artists and had established a relationship with the Arts Council to provide funding for the conversion of the artists’ studios.
“It’s quite extraordinary, we never planned to do it, it was always about self-help but then given the opportunity that these houses presented we thought well we must make them available to other artists,” Harvey says, evidently still somewhat surprised.
After four pioneering decades, Acme is now the subject of a special show at the Whitechapel Gallery exploring its radical history through archive material including posters, catalogues, photographs and films.
Radical experiment
Part of what makes the Acme story so compelling is the five-and-a-half years the group spent from 1976-81 turning a derelict banana warehouse in Covent Garden into a cutting-edge exhibition space for an incredible array of (literally) ground-breaking performance and installation artists.
“Being a short-life property that was due to for demolition, there was an attitude to the building that saw the space as sacrificial, so we quickly established a reputation for being uncompromising in terms of accommodating how an artist needed to present their work – even if it the space was being structurally challenged,” Harvey says.
One of those artists was Kerry Trengove, who in 1977 famously sealed himself into a bunker inside the gallery, tunnelling his way down through the basement only to emerge from a pile of rubble and dust on Shelton Street eight days later.
Then there was pyrotechnic sculptor Stephen Cripps who performed several times at the gallery, filling the space with a volatile mix of fire and explosives.
When it closed in 1981, critics mourned the loss of such an experimental, rebellious fixture on the gallery circuit, with Waldemar Januszczak declaring the 1970s “officially over.”
Despite his obvious affection for those experimental, unselfconscious years full of energy and zeal, Harvey maintains it was right for the gallery to close when it did.
“We’re talking about a period when that kind of 60s notion that an alternative to both commercial and public galleries could exist,” he says.
“Now it’s very difficult to be a public museum or a public gallery without being part of the market. I think the market is actually totally dominant now, so there’s a big question about where the alternative is or indeed where the radical is.”
Supporting artists
Acme recognised long ago that its future depended on property ownership and, with aid of capital lottery funding from the Arts Council and planning partnerships with house builders, it has managed to secure a substantial property portfolio unlike any other studio organisation in the country.
It’s a phenomenal though quiet success story of an organisation that Turner Prize-winning sculptor Rachel Whiteread, herself a former Acme studio holder (like roughly a third of all Turner Prize nominees, including eight winners), has called “silently one of the supportive bodies in operation.”
It may have taken 40 years but by April 2015 Acme will be entirely independent and self-sustaining, slowly generating increasing amounts of income to invest back into the arts at a time when local authorities are highly unlikely to be able, or indeed willing, to ring-fence funding to subsidise affordable studio space.
“Unfortunately I think there’s going to be a huge amount of loss of affordable studio space in the Eats End over the next few years. The rise in property prices in Hackney is absolutely extraordinary and how any artist can afford to live or work there in the future is really questionable,” Harvey says.
“Our buildings are not going to be regenerated out.”
Supporting Artists: Acme’s First Decade 1972-1982 runs at the Whitechapel Gallery until 23 February 2014
It’s hard to imagine now just how different a landscape the decaying industrial wasteland of London’s East End presented in the early 1970s through the murky veil of economic recession.
Here, among dormant factories, rotting riverside warehouses and boarded-up houses, a group of art school grads led by Jonathan Harvey and David Panton found their future.
“When we approached the Greater London Council for property they said you can squat, because there was a huge amount of squatting going on then, in which case we’ll get you out, or go away and form yourself into a housing association that will give you the legal structure to have a conversation with us,” Harvey recalls at his top-floor office in Mile End.
So in November 1972 seven founder members scraped together £10 apiece to form the artist-led charitable Acme Housing Association Ltd.
The GLC initially transferred two derelict shops on Devons Road in Bow. By December 1974, Acme was managing 76 houses, providing living and studio space for 90 artists and had established a relationship with the Arts Council to provide funding for the conversion of the artists’ studios.
“It’s quite extraordinary, we never planned to do it, it was always about self-help but then given the opportunity that these houses presented we thought well we must make them available to other artists,” Harvey says, evidently still somewhat surprised.
After four pioneering decades, Acme is now the subject of a special show at the Whitechapel Gallery exploring its radical history through archive material including posters, catalogues, photographs and films.
Radical experiment
Part of what makes the Acme story so compelling is the five-and-a-half years the group spent from 1976-81 turning a derelict banana warehouse in Covent Garden into a cutting-edge exhibition space for an incredible array of (literally) ground-breaking performance and installation artists.
“Being a short-life property that was due to for demolition, there was an attitude to the building that saw the space as sacrificial, so we quickly established a reputation for being uncompromising in terms of accommodating how an artist needed to present their work – even if it the space was being structurally challenged,” Harvey says.
One of those artists was Kerry Trengove, who in 1977 famously sealed himself into a bunker inside the gallery, tunnelling his way down through the basement only to emerge from a pile of rubble and dust on Shelton Street eight days later.
Then there was pyrotechnic sculptor Stephen Cripps who performed several times at the gallery, filling the space with a volatile mix of fire and explosives.
When it closed in 1981, critics mourned the loss of such an experimental, rebellious fixture on the gallery circuit, with Waldemar Januszczak declaring the 1970s “officially over.”
Despite his obvious affection for those experimental, unselfconscious years full of energy and zeal, Harvey maintains it was right for the gallery to close when it did.
“We’re talking about a period when that kind of 60s notion that an alternative to both commercial and public galleries could exist,” he says.
“Now it’s very difficult to be a public museum or a public gallery without being part of the market. I think the market is actually totally dominant now, so there’s a big question about where the alternative is or indeed where the radical is.”
Supporting artists
Acme recognised long ago that its future depended on property ownership and, with aid of capital lottery funding from the Arts Council and planning partnerships with house builders, it has managed to secure a substantial property portfolio unlike any other studio organisation in the country.
It’s a phenomenal though quiet success story of an organisation that Turner Prize-winning sculptor Rachel Whiteread, herself a former Acme studio holder (like roughly a third of all Turner Prize nominees, including eight winners), has called “silently one of the supportive bodies in operation.”
It may have taken 40 years but by April 2015 Acme will be entirely independent and self-sustaining, slowly generating increasing amounts of income to invest back into the arts at a time when local authorities are highly unlikely to be able, or indeed willing, to ring-fence funding to subsidise affordable studio space.
“Unfortunately I think there’s going to be a huge amount of loss of affordable studio space in the Eats End over the next few years. The rise in property prices in Hackney is absolutely extraordinary and how any artist can afford to live or work there in the future is really questionable,” Harvey says.
“Our buildings are not going to be regenerated out.”
Supporting Artists: Acme’s First Decade 1972-1982 runs at the Whitechapel Gallery until 23 February 2014
Th is month sees the broadcast of an ambitious international project featuring 30 new one-person shows performed in 30 homes across the capital. Organised by the theatre Royal Stratford East, the Home Theatre project aims to link boroughs with extremely low arts engagement to more a ffluent areas of the city, with artists working on the project taking inspiration from the stories of those hosting the performances in their own homes.
Run in partnership with the Festival Internacional de Cenas em Casa (International Festival of Home Theatre), the idea to bring Home Theatre to the UK was inspired by artistic director Kerry Michael’s trip to Brazil earlier this year.
“Home Theatre is about staging performances in people’s familiar surroundings. In a sense, we will be serving our audiences and letting them be our masters. It’s about telling great stories from across the capital,” he says.
“It’s also a great opportunity for artists and London audiences to come together, share a meal and have an open dialogue about their stories and the project.”
Exploring the relationship between art and audiences, Home Theatre extends the legacy of the theatre Royal Stratford’s East Open Stage project, a radical community-curated programme aimed at rede fining who decides and makes theatre and how it is made and presented.
The collaboration between the 30 hosts, artists and fi lmmakers should generate exciting new ideas and insights for staging and creating theatre outside of established venues and in the very heart of local communities.
For your viewing pleasure, a film of each bespoke performance will be released every 30 minutes on the theatre’s online performance platform and at the theatre itself as part of the Home Th eatre 30 x 30 digital event taking place on Saturday 9 November.
Detail from Ten Ways To Kill Yourself by Charlie Fjätström
Community, collaboration and a real passion for photography is how David George and Fiona Yaron-Field describe the ethos at Uncertain States, the artist cooperative they co-founded with fellow photographer Spencer Rowell in 2009.
Through exhibitions, talks and a quarterly broadsheet, the group aims to nurture critical dialogue on photography and promote work that re flects key social and political concerns.
Available in galleries and museums across the UK, the Uncertain States broadsheet presents work by lens-based artists looking for an alternative platform to show their images outside of the commercial gallery system.
“ The photography scene here is incredibly rich but I think underrepresented by the big institutions like the Photographers’ Gallery,” George says. “The newspaper isn’t glossy, there are no ads and it’s not for pro fit and that’s been really important in enabling us to show the type of work we’ve wanted to show. Above all it’s about the dissemination of ideas.”
Now Uncertain States is celebrating its fourth year with an exhibition at the Bank Gallery in Whitechapel showcasing works by 28 photographers who have contributed to the broadsheet.
It includes works from photographer Tom Hunter’s Life and Death in Hackney (2000), a series of melancholic images loosely based on Pre-Raphaelite paintings which depict the lives of travellers in the post-industrial landscape of the Lea Valley in the East End.
Photographer John Goto’s portraits of young people taken at Friday night dances at Lewisham Youth Centre in 1977 are also featured. Named after the musical sub-genre that emerged from the South London reggae scene in the 1970s, Goto’s series Lovers’ Rock initially met with little interest from potential exhibitors but has recently been praised for o ffering a counter-narrative to the dominant image of black youth at the time.
Uncertain States co-founder Fiona Yaron-Field is well aware of the problems artists can face in getting works featuring particular subject matters exhibited in commercial galleries.
She recalls being told that her body of work based on her experiences raising a child with Down’s syndrome was not ‘sexy’ enough for the gallery space. Her portraits of pregnant women carrying children with Down’s syndrome entitled Safe Haven are also on show at the Bank Gallery.
“Uncertain States is really a nomadic thing, a network to support photographic practice,” Yaron-Field explains, adding that the cooperative also holds free talks with photographers and filmmakers on the first Tuesday of every month upstairs at the Cat & Mutton on Broadway Market in Hackney.
