Photography: Trade in pictures tells tales of twinned cities

11th October 2002, 1:00am

Handsworth through Southern Eyes
Photographs by George Hallett, 1972

No Time for FlowersRedemption Song
Photographs by Vanley Burke

Photographs capture the ephemeral: a fleeting moment, expression, event or long-gone building. They offer a powerful link to the past and chronicle change in people’s lives. That’s why Pete James, head of photography at Birmingham Central Library, is fanatical about collecting, archiving and displaying photographs.

James has been working on an ambitious project for several years to link Birmingham with its twin city, Johannesburg, by exchanging archives and photographic exhibitions. One will mark Black History Month and opens at the city’s Soho House Museum next week; the other will open at Museum Africa in Johannesburg in December.

The key players are Jamaican-born Vanley Burke, who grew up in Handsworth, the multi-racial inner-city suburb of Birmingham plagued by riots in the Eighties, and George Hallett, born in Cape Town, who was classified “coloured” by the infamous apartheid regime.

The connection seems tenuous. But by chance, Hallett’s first commission after exiling himself to London from a culturally stifling, oppressive South Africa in 1970, came from The TES a year later. As a young, inexperienced picture editor, I mischievously asked him to photograph Arthur Jensen, the controversial American professor who claimed American blacks had lower IQs than whites. Hallett recalls exclaiming: “You want me to photograph a racist?”

“You come from the world capital of racism, you’ll know how to handle him,” was the approximate reply. (Jensen later called him “an artist” and asked Hallett to photograph him when his second book was published.)

The result was a stunning picture, and many more assignments followed. One memorable picture showed two little boys outside a grocery shop. This proved to be another piece of serendipity.

Pete James and Vanley Burke had met Hallett during separate visits to South Africa which led to proposals for the exchange project. At a subsequent meeting at the British Council (one of the sponsors) in London last year, Hallett was showing his 1972 Handsworth collection to Burke and wondered if anyone would remember the people he photographed.

“I can tell you who those two are - they’re my brothers, and that’s my mother’s shop,” he replied. Gary works for a fire alarm firm; Andrew is an advisory teacher in Tower Hamlets.)

Hallett looks back on the early 1970s with affection.“I arrived in London in the age of Aquarius - the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Carnaby Street, hippies. South Africa was a mental and physical prison. Culture was dead: artists, writers, musicians had left; I had no outlets for my photography. In London, I met people from all over the planet; and the other amazing thing was I could work.”

He worked on The TES with women editors: “What a change from the male-dominated world of South Africa.”

...Burke has spent the past 30 years chronicling the lives of black people in Birmingham. “I’d rather buy film than eat,” he explains.

His vast archive is now, at James’s request, in the Central Library, where he hopes local people will use it.

Hallett’s exhibition features 50 black and white pictures of street scenes: a striking one of two middle-aged women, one black, one white, leaning on their brooms, chatting, is a favourite. “I never saw that happen back home.”

He hopes it will not only provide local people with a nostalgic look back, but will “motivate school children to become the next generation of collectors and curators of black history”.

Read this article in full in this week’s TES Friday magazine

‘Handsworth through Southern Eyes’, photographs by George Hallett, 1972: Soho House Museum, Handsworth; www.photoexchange.org
October 12 to January 12 2003 .