View from the north: The wit and warmth of Salford's post-war street photographer

Photographer Shirley Baker’s witty, tender portraits have long been overlooked. A new book hopes to shed light on her legacy

Shirley Baker became obsessed with photography as a young girl growing up in Salford, transfixed by her mother’s folding camera.

For her 10th birthday she got a camera of her own, a plastic box Brownie, and she was soon developing her own negatives in the chilly darkness of the family coal shed. From then until the turn of the millennium, she roamed the streets in the north of England with her camera tucked in her handbag – she called her desire to photograph a “compulsion”.

Born in 1932, Baker captured the devastating poverty of the post-war housing estates, followed by the colourful explosion of punk and other youth cultures, and the malaise which settled in neighbourhoods after deindustrialisation.

“I did know that fundamental changes were taking place ... and nobody seemed to be interested in recording the face of the people or anything in their lives,” Baker wrote. “The notion of someone wandering the unpicturesque streets of Manchester and Salford with a camera seemed quite crazy to most people then.”

Her extraordinary archive is more than just a document of a changing society. Baker had a knack for capturing the timeless contradictions – both joyful and tragic – of people’s lived experience.

A group of children run towards the horizon in a graveyard in the 1960s, caught between the austere adult monuments of tombstones and factory chimneys. Shoppers unconsciously mimic the clothes and stances of shop mannequins; many times we catch a passer-by’s ambivalent gaze.

A quizzical warmth radiates from her work. “I like to watch people – not as a snooper with a hidden camera, but as a member of the public like anyone else on the street,” she once wrote.

Baker died in 2014. She remains a relative unknown, even as the work of other overlooked female street photographers like Vivian Maier and Jill Freedman is being celebrated. A new book from Mack, titled Shirley Baker, hopes to change that.

Editor Lou Stoppard visited Baker’s daughter and found boxes of unseen prints, compiling a comprehensive overview of half a century’s work, including Baker’s time spent in the south of France. “They show an image-maker with an analytical eye,” writes Stoppard in the book’s introduction, “someone who caught moments of great coincidence or aesthetic harmony, but saw through the purely visual into something more human—the great madness and oddness of this life.”

‘Shirley Baker’, edited by Lou Stoppard, is published by Mack