North: Liverpool Highlights
Co-curators Lou Stoppard & Adam Murray discuss some images of Liverpool that appear in our current exhibition, North: Identity, Photography, Fashion.
John Bulmer – Liverpool 1965
John Bulmer is a British photographer worker who produced a series of seminal reportage projects documenting Northern England in the 1960s and 70s for publications such as The Sunday Times. Bulmer’s work is important in this exhibition as it provides a comprehensive document of life and lays the foundations for some of the reoccurring motifs that we see in more recent fashion editorials. This particular image shot in Liverpool in 1965 depicts various themes Lou and I have explored in our research to do with housing, domesticity and the family.
– Adam Murray
David Sims – From Heaven Up Here. Liverpool Re-Visited 2006
This image is from a project photographed by David Sims and casting by Thom Murphy that first appeared in luxury fashion publication Self Service in 2006. A studio was set up in the Adelphi hotel in Liverpool and young women were photographed in the clothing they happened to be wearing that day. This is not a traditional fashion shoot in the way that a model is dressed with pre decided clothing. Rather, it is a celebration of personal style and the way clothing, make up, hair style and pose is used by each of us as means of expression.
– Adam Murray
Alice Hawkins – from The Liver Birds, 2013
Photographer Alice Hawkins is full of respect for her subjects and often plays with or challenges these stereotypes, celebrating the routines and rituals of British women. Highly influenced by Coronation Street and Bet Lynch, she seeks to shoot women ‘who don’t conform to a normal notion of beauty.’ She continues, ‘Lynch is the epitome of what I love and admire about women – women who are audacious in their appearance. They push what it is to be feminine beyond the realms of normal. Some people may consider them to look tacky or tasteless but I think they are dignified and I am completely genuine with my admiration and representation of them in my work. I have dreams to be like them myself.’ Here, glossy fashion bible LOVE commissioned her for this shoot starring Abbey Clancy and members of her extended clan. Their poise and vibrancy is striking.
– Lou Stoppard
Michelle Sank – Blaze, Dancer, Pierhead, 2007
The aspects of Northern culture that are most regularly taken up by the fashion press tend to relate mostly to subculture, music and sport. Therefore, often a highly masculine image dominates. During our research we were struck by these images by these 2007 images by Michelle Sank in the Open Eye archive that seemed to challenge these norms. 2007 marked the 800th birthday of the Borough of Liverpool and to celebrate the occasion Open Eye produced The Water’s Edge, a photographic commission, exhibition and book that explored the women who work, or worked, in and around the city’s waterfront, or who have departed from it to work at sea.
– Lou Stoppard
North: Identity, Photography, Fashion continues at Open Eye Gallery 6 January – 19 March 2017.
