10 Jan 2025
We’ve had a great time working with second year Nottingham Trent University English students on their Literary Practices module where they have been producing articles, events, resources, and public-facing outputs on the theme of Literature and Visual Culture.
Ahmad Almatrouk, Omar Almutairi, Mitzi Stanford and Karina Watracz have assembled a written response to our September 2024 exhibition with a piece entitled A multi-cultural response to Bonington Gallery’s latest exhibition: ‘After the End of History: British Working Class Photography (1989-2024)’. This also included an in-person tour and introduction event in the gallery. Enjoy the read…
After the End of History: British Working Class Photography 1989-2024 is a Hayward Gallery touring exhibition curated by Johny Pits, who is a self-taught photographer, writer and broadcaster from Sheffield, England—a Northern soul child. He is the product of an African American musician father and a white working-class mother who taught English in the Yemeni community. These identities are reflected in the show by his purpose of emphasising the perspectives of practitioners who turn their gaze towards both their communities and outwards to the wider world, so instead of looking at working-class people, the exhibition will explore life through the lenses of working-class practitioners, who have not only turned their gaze towards their own communities but also out towards the world.
As a part of a project for one of our English modules focusing on visual culture, in our second year of studying the English BA course at Nottingham Trent University, four of us (Ahmad Almatrouk, Omar Almutairi, Mitzi Stanford and Karina Watracz) had the opportunity of reviewing and analysing Bonington Gallery’s autumn exhibition After the End of History: British Working Class Photography 1989-2024. To conclude our review and close analysis of the exhibition, we shared our study by conducting a walking tour with our module leader Jenni Ramone, other NTU faculty and a few postgraduate researchers; we took them around the exhibition for a tour of the art as seen through our eyes and related the photographs to our own backgrounds, cultures and personal responses. The guided tour ended up being a very stimulating and successful event.
There are 25 artists in the show but we have focused on 5 that we felt greatly interested in and connected to: the culturally gendered and baffling work of Kelly O’Brien, Richard Billingham’s deeply intimate and beautifully mundane portraits, Hannah Starkey’s interesting portrayal of women in urban settings, Chris Shaw’s delicately private lens of working in hotels and Tom Wood’s somewhat unsettling and dismal but quietly astounding set of photographs documenting the stages of life through bus stops.
This blog post consists of our own writing and pondering on the reflections of our own backgrounds within the works and exploring the contexts and meanings behind decisions surrounding this exhibition and from close conversation with Gallery Director Tom Godfrey; we aim to shed light on this unique and thought-provoking show.
Starting with Ahmed’s reflection on Kelly O’Brien:
The photography of Kelly O’Brien highlights issues of gender roles, class identity, and the unseen labour of working class women. Her personal art is influenced by her own upbringing in a council home with an Irish immigrant single mother. O’Brien’s photographs reflect the everyday lives of women and domestic places, especially those of her grandmother, Nana, who is depicted as the cleaner. Her art challenges us to consider what is apparent and what is invisible in our daily settings, whether they be at work, school, or home.
“I am going to focus on these 3 pictures, ‘Nana’s Bathroom’ (2014), ‘Cleaner No.1’ (2022) and ‘Cleaner No.2’ (2022).
O’Brien’s ‘Nana’s Bathroom’ (2014) caught my attention due to the use of light colour. The photograph shows a simple, nearly empty bathroom. The yellowish, off-white walls evoke council housing, which highlights the working-class experience, and the lack of material belongings suggests a life that lacks luxury, creating a possible underlying anti-capitalist message within the photograph.
In ‘Cleaner No.1’ (2022) and ‘Cleaner No.2’ (2022) we can see the direct invisibility of labourers; in both photographs, the cleaner’s faces are hidden. This facelessness symbolises how domestic workers are often only seen through the lens of their labour and their identities are overshadowed by their work. The plain white background emphasises her anonymity, making this a universal representation of many labourers whose work goes unnoticed. Coming from an Arabic background where we have an increased amount of labour, I personally felt that O’Brien’s photography has taken this information from my mind and accurately articulated the situation there. All the people who are working in honest jobs are just treated like people in the background or as stated before, “invisible,” which is heartbreaking but truthful.”
Karina’s contemplation of Richard Billingham:
Richard Billingham, is a photographer, artist, filmmaker and art teacher from Birmingham. Billingham’s work highly focuses on family life and a lot of his work features the house that he grew up in, his parents, and his brother.
“Billingham is one of the most impactful artists to me within the entire exhibition. Billingham’s photographs are some of the biggest photographs on display in the gallery; the size of the photographs is very effective, although it is the details in his photographs that awaken quite a visceral reaction within me. The settings of both photographs on display are very squalid: dirty walls, a random cloth on the bedhead, dirt on the armrest of the sofa, Billingham’s father in the bed who appears to be sick, and his mother doing a jigsaw puzzle. This kind of impoverished and dirty environment is a constantly recurring theme within Billingham’s work and it is something which makes him a deeply vulnerable artist.
What makes Billingham’s art even more vulnerable is the fact he uses his own family house as setting and his own parents as subjects. I think the exhibitionist nature of this kind of exposal of his family home and his family, when he clearly grew up in quite difficult circumstances, takes a lot of courage. When I was doing my research on Richard Billingham, I came across the website of another gallery which had his work on display, and I found some of Billingham’s commentary on his work displayed in that gallery and his family. The images which Billingham talks about are different from the ones displayed here, but the subjects are the same. Billingham states that: ‘The pictures shown here are of my father Raymond (born 1931): my mother Elisabeth (born 1950) and my brother Jason (born 1977). Ray is a chronic alcoholic and has drunk for as long as I can remember. He has not worked since he was made redundant from his job as a machinist around 1980. Liz very rarely drinks but she does smoke a lot of cigarettes. My younger brother still does not seem to know what he wants: he gets a job for a week or two and then leaves it. I think he is very lazy.’
Billingham’s work really reminds me of my grandmother’s house in a village in the South of Poland where I spent many of my Summers as a child. My grandmother was extremely poor, as were many other people in Poland due to its very long recovery from communism. The conditions in my grandmother’s house were also very dirty and squalid, but I always admired it, because it was home. Even though Billingham doesn’t shy away from presenting and talking about his gritty background, his art possesses a visible sentiment and love for his home and his family.”
Mitzi’s views on Hannah Starkey:
Hannah Starkey is a Belfast born artist who favours themes such as women depicted against urban backgrounds, which is abundantly visible in this large-scale work. This piece is untitled and it is the only work of hers included in the show. This photograph is a showcase of mundane realism in art; the typical British setting juxtaposed by a striking, confident woman highlights the beauty of the mundane and monotonous world and how we fit into our surroundings.
“One person could think she stands out as an outrageously incongruous character in this scene which could connote fear in the viewer but I personally think she dominates and foregrounds the scene, like she knows she’s different but wants to stand out. This work is significantly gendered but the feeling of not fitting in is universal. I can relate to Starkey and the woman in this photograph; growing up working class definitely has its negative and untrue stereotypes. I remember walking down the street with my parents who are working class punks who look like they just stepped out of a Sex Pistols gig and feeling overwhelmingly alien compared to the area I grew up in. Moreover, the sky is dark, gloomy and almost sublime in the painterly, ‘Turner’ sense of how scary the power of nature can be, it is almost as if God could strike down any second and destroy this dynamic moment in time. The colours of the background are very dull, and dark which creates an antithesis between the foregrounded character in the composition who stands out as she has red hair, wearing pink boots and long blue socks, she’s making a statement. It makes us wonder, is this an unnatural environment for her? Does she feel nervous being there or comfortable? There are 2 other figures in the photo who are void of colour and fade away with insignificance compared to the female perspective which dominates, linking back to the themes that Starkey focuses on. Additionally, connecting this work to the Working class theme running throughout this exhibition felt distanced and difficult for me at first but when you think about Starkey’s intentions and forcibly peel your eyes away from the interesting and dominating woman in the foreground you can see that the writing on the right wall above her is a mural which were common around Belfast for both Protestants and Catholics to acknowledge the loss of life in battles such as WW1, this specific Loyalist mural is commending the South Belfast brigade and the subtle inclusion of realist horrors, a sense that ghosts are lingering on the street contrasted with a woman dressed in Japanese, Lolita style clothes who objectively does not fit into the environment feels so surreal and dystopian that it intrinsically displays themes of the working class life, especially the merging of identities.”
Omar on Chris Shaw:
Shaw was born in Wallasey Merseyside in 1961; he is a documentary photographer and one of his most well-known works, Life as a Night Porter, came from years of working in hotels across Europe, often during night shifts. He stated that:
the reason that I got the hotel job was I was homeless, actually, and a way to get out of my homeless situation would be to get a job in a hotel which had staff accommodation, …
“Having to keep himself awake, he started taking photographs to help him stay awake so he wouldn’t get fired. He took photographs of anything he found bizarre that he encountered; from naked drunk men, drunk people locking themselves out of their rooms, which to him it’s what he hated the most. He wasn’t interested in capturing conventional beauty. Instead, he gravitated towards raw and sometimes uncomfortable truths about society, and that was an era when photographers were pushing boundaries, but Chris stood apart from that by having a dark and an intensely personal style. I find something haunting about the way he captures isolation in crowded urban environments, and that’s a reminder that even in the most populated areas, there are stories of loneliness and solitude. Chris started capturing these spaces and the people within them, creating photos that feel like stolen moments, as if the viewer is seeing something that’s not meant to be seen.
What makes his work particularly powerful is the aesthetic that he developed; his photographs are usually black and white, often grainy or underexposed. This style brings a feeling of mystery and darkness, making each scene feel raw and real. He was heavily influenced by photographers like Anders Petersen and Daido Moriyama, who also embraced imperfection and darkness over polished visuals. Chris made this style distinctly his own, using it to reveal an almost cinematic quality that captivates the audience. His photographs have been displayed in exhibitions around the world and published in books like Life as a Night Porter and Weeds of Wallasey. Through his work, Shaw has built a unique legacy in documentary photography, inspiring others to seek beauty in places and moments that might go unnoticed.”
Back to Mitzi looking at Tom Wood:
Wood is an Irish born artist who lived in Merseyside between 1978 and 2003 before moving to north Wales. Due to costs, he uses versatile mediums such as old fine film and out of date filmstock which lends a grainy quality to his images. For over 15 years, Wood documented his bus journeys through photography, capturing an extensive collection of images that culminated in his renowned series All Zones Off Peak in the late 1990s.
“Within these photographs, the bus transforms into a stage, with passengers assuming the role of performers. Some subjects confront the camera directly, while others gaze dreamily out of the windows, seemingly unaware of Wood’s presence. At times, the perspective shifts outward, as figures on the street appear blurred by rain-speckled glass; in other moments, Wood’s lens reverses the gaze, observing them from outside the vehicle. His bus journeys depicted take place in Liverpool; the images show diversity and intimate daily life of strangers looking into or through bus windows, even so that the viewer’s own reflection also becomes a part of the image. His work is shown through 4 framed photographs symmetrically placed forming a square, titles include: Towards Huyton (1992), Chester Bus Station (1992), Lime Street, Liverpool (1995) and Kirkby (1996), all the photographs are analogue darkroom prints on Maxima Gloss. Two of the photographs are taken from the interior of a bus, the first scene is decorated with characters, children who are innocent of mind and distracted by their individual lives; to me it’s quite a peaceful and humorous image. There’s graffiti on the interior, a nod to your average busy bus passing through working class neighbourhoods. You don’t particularly focus on one figure or face, it’s a universal theme of mundane life but also intimate and arguably beautiful. The other photograph taken inside of a bus is a combined lens of the interior scene and another bus looking in, the windows are foggy, reminding us of a chilly rainy day, figures are looking at one another between buses, it’s an awkward experience we’ve all had. The tilted angle provides an unstable composition, perhaps suggesting a tension between the characters within the two buses looking at one another, one young and one old.
The two other photographs are taken of people waiting at bus stops, one shows two young girls directly addressing the viewer by looking nervous and/or judgemental at the camera in a visually unappealing and dreary bus stop. The other image contrasts greatly by portraying mothers and their children also waiting for the bus, another mundane, very day life scene, but the viewers eyes lock straight onto a glamorous looking woman and mother wearing a pink blazer and rocking an 80s hairstyle, she’s dominating the scene by juxtaposing herself (not on purpose perhaps) with the setting of a busy bus stop. However, her eyes are cast downwards, almost in submission or deep though, maybe even sadness. I’ve thought long and hard about what she might be thinking about, but I can’t quite figure it out, so this work left me slightly unsatisfied but heavily intrigued.”
And that concludes our review of Bonington Gallery’s Autumn 2024 exhibition. Throughout writing this blog and figuring out how to talk about art in this way we really had to challenge ourselves to see from different perspectives; the art existing in the exhibition forced us to talk to one another about our own backgrounds, which we quickly realised were worlds apart as we all come from very different upbringings, but all undeniably working class which gave foundation to the universally relatable topics of conversation that we had during this process. It brought us together, as we saw ourselves in the photographs we were also able to understand each other potently. For those of you who missed the exhibition then it travels to Stills Gallery, Edinburgh in March 2025.
Written by Ahmad Almatrouk, Omar Almutairi, Mitzi Stanford and Karina Watracz.
