Childhood Streets

As a teenager, British artist Graham Ovenden spent many weekends roaming the streets of London (primarily the East End) photographing its busy street life. (For the first several years Ovenden used a cheap Brownie camera; in his late teens he acquired a 35mm.) "Childhood Streets," which more than 35 years later collects Ovenden's photographic explorations, is important both as an historical document and as an artistic achievement.

The work evokes a post-War, but pre-modern, London before the automobile had completely transformed it, rendering London's streets unsafe as a place for children to play. The work also shows London before the dilapidated Victorian tenements of the East End were torn down to make way for housing projects, before shopping centers began to replace London's many street markets and before children moved their play indoors to be near the television. It was a remarkably different world.

Although Ovenden was mostly unaware of the history of photography at the time, these images parallel other great photographs of metropolitan streetlife - for example, those of Doisneau, Brassa, Cartier-Bresson, Helen Levitt, and above all Bill Brandt. Whitechapel Shoe Shop, 1963' has the surreal quality of Atget's turn-of-the-century views of Paris shop fronts, Stepney, 1959' has the suffused air of a nineteenth-century calotype, while Old Woman, Stepney, 1957' strongly echoes The Crawlers' from John Thompson's "Street Life of London" series shot a century ago. In addition to these masterfully confident images, there are the many images of young girls (which would become the focus of Ovenden's later work as a painter): skinnydipping in the park, trying on clothes at the street markets, shopping and running errands with, or for, their parents, minding their younger siblings, or just playing in the street alone and in playgroups.

Some of the images here are truly astounding and one has to remind oneself constantly that these images were taken by a teenage amateur photographer (a rarity in the history of photography in any case). Visible even then was Ovenden's painterly eye and his love of the rough graphic quality which can be achieved in photography -- intense grain, strong contrasts, the chiarascuro of the blurred image.