For more than forty-five years I have worked as a photographer in Britain. I have walked its towns and cities, its industrial estates, offices, factories, schools, churches, private houses, high streets and rural back roads. I have seen wealth and poverty in close proximity.
The longer one looks at Britain, the harder it becomes to accept any simple account of it. The country is not an idea held in the abstract. It is a set of relationships lived at close range. It is your neighbour, the local shopkeeper, the people on the bus, on the tube, the cleaner, the nurse, the warehouse worker, the driver, the teacher and yes even, perhaps especially, the stranger.
A society is made from these small recognitions. And our society is damaged when people are encouraged to see one another as somehow ‘other’.
When people threaten those who are visibly different by race, religion, language, dress, gender or sexuality, they are not making a serious political argument. They are taking whatever anger they have been carrying and discharging it onto people who are often in no position to answer back.
There may be real grievances behind some of this anger. It would be foolish to deny that many people in Britain feel abandoned, patronised, economically trapped, culturally unheard or politically betrayed. Those feelings do not come from nowhere. Work has disappeared from places that once had a clear purpose. Public life has become thinner. Housing is insecure. Wages are stretched. People who feel powerless are easily drawn towards explanations that give their pain a visible object.
But pain does not become wisdom simply because it is real. Grievance does not become justice because it has found someone to blame. The vulnerable person in the street is not the author of whatever complaint is fresh that week. To frighten that person is not to confront power. It is to avoid it.
The creation of fear is often presented as strength by those who have very little of it. Real strength is not the ability to make another person fearful. It is the capacity to resist the satisfactions of cruelty, especially when cruelty is being licensed by a crowd. It is the discipline to think beyond the first explanation, the first enemy, the first slogan. It is the willingness to ask whether one’s anger has been earned by the person in front of you, or merely placed upon them because they are near enough to be reached.
This is not intelligence. It is a retreat from intelligence. It is a refusal to hold more than one fact in the mind at once.
The camera teaches that most lives are more complicated than they appear from a distance. It teaches that dignity is often quiet, that hardship is often hidden, and that the person being turned into a symbol is usually just trying to get through the day. To terrorise such a person is not an act of patriotism, clarity or courage. It is a failure of attention, a failure of imagination, and a failure of moral seriousness.
Toxteth, Liverpool, 1981
