T
his was taken in 1981 at a Berni Inn steakhouse in Harrow, London. I think it’s a Beefeater now. These people had just walked in out of the rain. They were a bit wary of me, but stood there for a few seconds and I was able to grab one frame before they disappeared. It was for the magazine New Society, founded in the early 1960s to document society in ways understandable to general readers, avoiding jargon – a mirror of its stablemate, New Scientist. The art editors had almost complete freedom to commission and choose pictures.
The brief was to find the lower middle class, to accompany an article about this growing demographic. But the problem was that nobody wanted to admit to being lower middle class. There was no pride in it, like there was in being working class. People just looked baffled when I approached them, so I started to gloss over that part and simply said I was shooting for a magazine feature about how people lived in north London.
I was mostly doing editorial work at that time after producing work for an exhibition on Welsh seaside towns in the late 1970s, which proved traumatic. The gallery director who commissioned it left and their replacement absolutely hated what I was doing. He said it was too depressing, was worried his funding would be cut and attempted to bury it by showing amateur photographers’ work alongside mine. Then the pictures went unseen for 40 years. The experience was so bad that I didn’t do another gallery project for decades. But the shots resurfaced in 2021 thanks to an exhibition at Turner Contemporary in Margate.
When you’re taking pictures, you’ve got to be pretty alive at that moment. I was asking everybody’s permission because I was using a Rolleiflex and a flash with a big, heavy power pack. There’s an old saying about using flashes: they’re like taking a revolver to the opera – they’re quite conspicuous! I much prefer to blend in, which means you get a different kind of shot. But if you hang around, you can usually get people to ignore the camera and carry on with what they’re doing. I got several quite interesting pictures of some teenagers who were probably underage drinkers sitting in the bar that night, too. None of these images made it into the magazine – they used one I took at a nearby garden centre instead.
But they’re finally on display in a new show of my analogue work up to 1990 – the year Photoshop was released. I was self taught and started photography when I was 14. There’s quite a lot of pre-digital artwork in the show as well as photographs in a photomontage style that I used in political satire for Private Eye and the New Statesman. It was all done in the darkroom, using cut-out pieces of red paper to build up a jigsaw of an image. I learned how to retouch it and airbrush – words that are now more familiar from Photoshop and digital retouching, but they are exact equivalents of what I used to do in the darkroom, including burning and dodging, too. There were just a handful of people doing it in London in the 1970s and 80s. It was a very creative period and a lot of the time you were chosen because of your political attitude – except at Private Eye, where you had to be funny as well. They didn’t care if the work was well done. They went to a great deal of trouble to make it look as though the mag was pasted up on a kitchen table.
When I did my fine art degree, a lot of the tutors were very suspicious of me. They would come around and say: “Yeah, that’s quite interesting, Mike, but why aren’t you doing something more worthy, like painting?” I fought back as much as I could, and there were a few lecturers who supported me, but it was an uphill struggle. Fortunately, my degree show was seen by a curator who offered me an exhibition. And then some of the work got into the V&A, where it remains.
I think a lot of photographers who worked for New Society did some of their best work for it. They were using Magnum photographers, Martin Parr – and many of the pictures, like this one, stand up on their own, without an explanation. They transcend the need to illustrate an article. They show a different view of Britain in that era.
Being There: Photographs 1968-1990 by Michael Bennett is at the Coningsby Gallery, London, until 7 October
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