Issue 113 / April-May 2021

REVIEWS
“Change is one
of few constants
in Liverpool”
Three lads on bikes, Maud Street and Elaine Street, L8 1979, Ian Clegg, as part of Tell It Like It Is
L—A City Through Its People
Open Eye Gallery – online
There are three images missing from Emma Case’s RED
exhibition at the Open Eye Gallery’s L—A City Through
Its People, each of which can be found three miles away
on the Homebaked terraces of Oakfield Road adjacent
to Anfield stadium. Together with the 93 photographs
on display inside Open Eye, those remaining three bring
Case’s archive total to 96. It’s a number we’re all familiar
with, and it’s a number that will likely never disappear
from conversations about who and what Liverpool is.
As a football fan, an Evertonian in fact, even I see
myself in these photographs taken outside Herr Klopp’s
(now fragile) fortress and in the homes and pubs of his
followers; both as a boy picking out my first scarf, and
later as a teenager speculating who might make the
line-up over an afternoon pint with my dad – each of us
drowned out by a cacophony of ‘same again loves’ and
half-cut tactical suggestions by those who never did
quite manage to leave the Kendall days behind.
Look hard enough and every football fan and their
dog will see themselves in these photographs, too, and
in turn will see so much of what has been taken away
from them by you-know-what. Not just fans, but from
those whose fixture-bound livelihoods depend on the
ecology of what it means to go the game – to the chippy,
the café, the pub, to the memorabilia stalls. But if the
sights, sounds and smells of football matches seem a
distant dream, then these images are, however brief, an
assurance that they haven’t really gone forever.
The 96 images are part of RED’s wider archive
spanning four years on what it means to be a Red, which,
alongside Emma Case’s material, also contains fans’
personal photographs, home interviews and amateur
home-made memorabilia. There are no footballing
celebrities in this collection, only a Crown Paintsclad
collective inheriting the batons of tribal solidarity
and community spirit. The same spirit passed to new
generations and whipped up with each rattle of the
turnstile and again reawakened in homes, streets and
inner ideals.
Tribal solidarity and community spirit – these ideas
flow through the city in abundance, stopping to resurface
once more in the Open Eye’s next collection. This sees
Scottie Press – Britain’s longest-running community
newspaper – present an archive of original photographs
and iconic headlines presented in line with the paper’s
50th anniversary – celebrated in February.
When the paper first printed in February 1971,
entering the decade under Conservative PM Edward
Heath, Scottie Press and those it served in and around
the Scotland Road area would see the city’s social fabric
ripped up with containerisation and a domino decline
in heavy industry. The move would have devastating
repercussions for the city that would endure well into the
80s and 90s. The resulting 50-year record of Liverpool’s
shifting social, political and religious landscape on display
here in Scottie Press’ exhibition is an intimate chronicle of
the city’s enduring activism, its places of work, worship
and what it did in its free time.
If RED and Scottie Press’ archives unveil what
Liverpool is, it’s fitting that, in closing L—A City Through
Its People, the final exhibition examines what Liverpool
once was – how it was perceived, shared and lived by
its people. Tell It Like It Is, an image-text collaboration
between photographer Ian Clegg and writer Laura
Robertson, is a series of prints on silver gelatin with
accompanying creative-contextual writing which
complement the archive’s fragmented moments of
nostalgia.
The 24 prints – shot on a “battered Nikon” with HP5
film and left to foment under Clegg’s bed for several
decades – are loosely grouped by geographical area,
leading you through the neighbourhoods within Toxteth,
the city centre and the docks. From L1 through L8, Tell
It Like It Is shows us equally battered street landscapes
in partial ruin, bordered up premises and giddy, feral-like
childhoods spent roaming through town on your bike
with your mates.
But, if these three exhibitions tell us of a city
confronting hardship, loss and deprivation, then just
as quickly, L— A City Through Its People tells us of
something we’ve no doubt always known about this
place: change is one of few constants in Liverpool, and its
people are what gets it through.
Matthew Berks / @Hewniverse_
Peggy by Emma Case, RED
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