| Description: |
The story of Janet Mendelsohn and her Birmingham photographs are a narrative of a place, a period and the making of a of work. It is a story of a young woman from one of the great centres of learning and privilege in the USA entering into a relationship with another young woman who was born and brought up in one of the most impoverished areas of Britain, at a time of enormous social change. The story of Janet and Kathleen and the archive they made together is an enthralling one. Janet Mendelsohn was born in 1943 in Washington in the US. She studied Social Relations at Radcliffe College (the Women’s college of Harvard University) in 1966, and in 1967 travelled to UK to study at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University. By the time she travelled to Birmingham she had already become interested in documentary photography. Mendelsohn’s Birmingham work, engaged, passionate, enquiring, was as much a product of Radcliffe, with its focus on women, gender and society, and its remarkable alumni (who included Helen Keller, Adrienne Rich and Betty Friedan) and as it was of the burgeoning humanist documentary photography of the US and Europe in the 1950s and 60s. For Mendelsohn, photography was social investigation rather than either art or photojournalism.
Part of our interest in this Fast Forward conference is in the way that bodies of photographic work come to light, often unknown for many years. These archives are fragile, often re-discovered by accident, or during the course of other researches. Janet Mendelsohn took her photographs away with her when she left Birmingham in 1968 to spend a year at the Royal College of Art in London and from there back to the US. Mendelsohn’s work was located in the context of Birmingham by the cultural historians Kieran Connell and Matthew Hilton, who were researching the history of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, a hugely influential focus for the study of popular culture, led by radical cultural theorist Stuart Hall. Hall’s voice was to become an important one in photography when he noted that: . The camera provides a sharp focus on what the image is manifestly about- the subject, centred in the foreground of the frame. The image is supplemented in dramatic visual and emotional impact by the ways it has been handled, its positioning, cutting and framing. These practices of representation foreground certain aspects, marginalise others. They establish a hierarchy of meanings. But they can always be read from their margins, for their backgrounds. Who are these people? What is their social background, their class, racial and gendered position, and do these apparently incidental things matter? What are they doing, where and with whom? What are they wearing? What do the expressions on their faces and their body language tell us about how life is being lived and experienced?
The still image arrests the flow of time, freezes the event, allowing us to look longer, get more out of it. What signifies is not the photographic text in isolation but the way it is caught up in a network of chains of signification that ‘overprint it’, its inscription into the currency of other discourses, which bring our different meanings. Its meaning can only be completed by the ways that we interrogate it. We don’t know if Hall and Mendelsohn discussed photography, but photography was almost certainly regarded with respect at the Centre, which was seen as one of the most radical and progressive research centres of its time and whose influence lives on to this day.
Connell and Hilton came across Janet’s work in illustrated reports published by the centre in the 1960s, and were intrigued by its quality and content. After some detective work, they contacted her in the US, where she had worked as a film producer for many years, and she subsequently donated her sizable archive of prints to the Cadbury Research Centre at Birmingham University in 2014. Kieran Connell and Matthew Hilton put together a small local show, and later, in 2016, a more substantial exhibition with a catalogue at the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham. This is where I come into the story, as Connell and Hilton commissioned me to write an essay on the photographic context for Janet’s work. The photographs shown at the Ikon were made almost entirely in Balsall Heath in inner city Birmingham. Originally a sedate and elegant nineteenth century middle- class suburb, by the 1960s, Balsall Heath, with the main Varna Road at its centre, had become Birmingham’s major red light district and a centre for migration from South Asia. The once-elegant houses fell into decay, and were subdivided into rooming houses and shabby flats. Corner shops, pubs and cafés formed the social hubs of the community, and life on the streets was hectic and crowded. The combination of vitality and cheapness meant that, for a time, Balsall Heath became a draw both for Birmingham’s artistic bohemia and for students, as well as a centre for prostitution. Balsall Heath was a highly visible example of British post-war society in transition, with a complex mix of groups, new populations engaging with the more traditional. All this must have been of great interest to Mendelsohn.
Janet Mendelsohn was very much a US photographer bringing the methodology of the new US documentarists to 1960s Britain. Although, in her Birmingham work, the traces of Walker Evans, Eugene Smith and Dorothea Lange, can all be seen, the intense focus of her study, on a particular locale, and its empathic nature is much closer to the work of Bruce Davidson, Danny Lyons and Larry Clarke. It is tempting to conjecture that she had also seen photographer Roger Mayne’s study of Southam Street in West London, photographed between 1958 and 1961, or had come across the work of photographer Nick Hedges, whose powerful photographs of deprivation and poor housing conditions in the Balsall Heath area of Birmingham were commissioned by the housing charity Shelter in the late 1960s. Coinciding with the release of Ken Loach’s TV drama about homelessness - Cathy Come Home - in 1966, Hedges’ work was dramatic and persuasive and as the driver of a dynamic Shelter campaign, had great public impact. Mendelsohn is not able to remember her time in Birmingham, but there are other residents whose memories have been preserved. In the archives of the Mass Observation collection at the University of Sussex are the diaries of Art student and trainee teacher Kate Paul, who moved to Birmingham at the end of the 1950s and lived in a flat on Varna Road in the centre of Balsall Heath. In her diary she observed:
The people who live on this street live on their sexual interests and fear and fear, …Men in cars kerb-crawl and raise their fingers, leaning forward, eager, their face drawn with lust. I hate these, not the street walkers. It’s really terrible in the street. They have cock fighting and stabbings and the police come up here in twos on motorbikes.
At night, it’s really grim, men melting into doorways beckoning. The endless crawl of cars, the slamming of doors, the women’s shrill voices”
As a loci for bohemianism, Varna Road with its large houses, cheap space and changing communities also became attractive. The British surrealist Conroy Maddox lived in Varna Road at the centre of what has been called ‘the Balsall Heath bohemia’ after the end of World War Two until the 1950s, and hosted a number of gatherings there ‘guests including local children, poets, communist intellectuals, post –war Caribbean immigrants and women in gypsy dress- or as nuns! On Varna Road, Janet met Kathleen (not her real name) who became her main subject/collaborator, Kathleen, a young woman, a sex worker and mother living and working in Balsall Heath. Janet and Kathleen were the same age as each other and even looked surprisingly similar. Though separated by upbringing, nationality and circumstance, they developed a friendship, and Mendelsohn was welcomed into Kathleen’s family. She also made a set of interviews with the people she photographed. Her sense of location was precise as she mapped out a very small area in which to base her main photography, Varna Road, the Kashmir Coffee Bar, Kathleen’s home shops and street life.
At the heart of Mendelsohn’s Birmingham work are her photographs of Kathleen and her family at home. Mendelsohn’s photographs of her are rich and poetic. Intimate, collaborative. Shot in available light, the gloomy, dishevelled interiors of Kathleen’s rooms assume a kind of grandeur, as with Kathleen as a central figure. These are photographs full of warmth and compassion, photographs made by one young woman about another young woman’s life. There is real connection here. Outside, on the street, in the café, outside the pub, Mendelsohn’s photography is an observation of life in Balsall Heath as reflected through Kathleen and her circle. Mendelsohn accompanies Kathleen as she chats with friends on street corners, pushes her pram, and visits the launderette; she photographed the broken-down bed where Kathleen took her clients. She observes Kathleen with her children in photographs of great poignancy. Bringing Janet Mendelsohn’s photographs into the public arena after a gap of almost half a century was an important addition to British photographic history. Questions hang over these photographs - their journey from private archive to public exhibition will mean that meaning will be inscribed upon the work and responses will come from both the local community, from photo historians and from the larger public. We will want to know more about why Janet Mendelsohn made these photographs, how she created and managed complex relationships with places and people and why photography played such a brief, if spectacular, part in her creative career. Evidence suggests that Mendelsohn’s Birmingham photographs were exhibited only once, after she had returned to the States in the 1970s. It is impossible to say what, if any, ambitions Mendelsohn may have had for the photographs - she went on to work as a film producer rather than an academic.
The places Janet Mendelsohn photographed in Balsall Heath are long gone, their fate sealed by ‘slum’ clearance in the 1970s. The cafes, the shops, the street corners where Kathleen and her friends gathered around her enormous pram, are now just memories preserved in photographs, or in oral histories, or passed down in reminiscences by the elderly. But, looking at these photographs quietly, one can imagine, and almost begin to hear the life that imbues them- the clamour of the café, the medley of accents and intonations, the voices of children, the violence and the sweetness. The subject matter of Mendelsohn’s photographs is harsh (as are the interviews which she made with her subjects while making the photographs) but Mendelsohn is an observer rather than a critic. In her photographs, the narrative is fragmentary, almost casual, with gaps and absences. Mendelsohn’s own voice is missing from this narrative- she is unable to tell us about her relationship with Kathleen and her friends, what she learnt at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies or why she gave up photography. But it is common, especially among women photographers from the 30s to the 60s to have very brief careers in photography unless they were sustained by studio practice or commercial work. As more researchers work on this collection, more clues will be found which will inform us about the making of this remarkable body of photography from Britain in the 1960s.
Working on the Janet Mendelsohn archive, with only the prints in the archive, with no personal documentation was challenging. Many questions remain- we can only conjecture about Janet’s relationship with Kathleen- observer or friend, or both. We know nothing about Kathleen’s reasons for taking part in what was a relatively substantial documentary project, and we have few clear ideas about Janet’s methodology. That this complete archive has survived and is now back just a few miles from the place where it was made, is remarkable. |
Tools
Tools
![[img]](https://ualresearchonline.arts.ac.uk/12208/1.haslightboxThumbnailVersion/Image00053.jpg)