browseGive my Regards to Elizabeth
Peter Bialobrzeski (Photographer)
Pretty in Pink - original exhibition text by Mick Brown, 1993:
Each morning I take the light-railway into the heart of London’s Docklands. Devastated by the Blitz of the Second World War, the Docklands area of East London has undergone a massive programme of rebuilding in the last ten years. Its soaring glass towers are a symbol of the triumphalist mood, which held sway in Britain the 1980s; the Britain of consumer affluence built on promissory notes. But the dream is looking increasingly threadbare. The train, which carries commuters to Docklands, breaks down too often. En route, it stops at a station, which was built, open, then closed, and is now the subject of endless building works. The train deposits its frustrated passengers in a gleaming ghost town of half-empty office blocks and deserted shopping arcades. Riding the train, one may sample the customary daily diet of the English press; the stories of child murder, teenage-violence, government bungling or duplicity, a royal divorce - how the company which built Docklands has now gone into receivership.
There is an England, of dreaming spires and scones for tea and jolly huntsmen dressed in red tunics, of pomp, ceremony, the changing of the guard and everyone knowing their place. This is not solely the England of tourist brochures, yet it exists as a shadow of an England of industrial prosperity and global influence.
Britain’s decline has become something of a cliché to the British, a backcloth against which we have lived out the smaller drama of our daily lives. I grew up in a Britain where the certainty of its imperial power was taken for granted. In geography lessons at school, half of the world was shaded pink; our colonies and dominions. By the time of adolescence these had become more a cause of guilt than pride. The British have responded to each turn of the screw with the mixture of phlegmatism, irony and long-suffering fatalism, which is the hallmark of our character. To an outsider this can seem strange, contradictory, frequently ridiculous. An outsider can often see us more honestly than we see ourselves.
I first met Peter when we were working together on a story for the Telegraph Magazine of London. We had been asked to prepare a piece comparing the English City of Coventry with the German city of Dresden, both of which had been heavily bombed during the war (Dresden to particularly catastrophic effect). In a way Coventry epitomises the fate of post-war Britain; before the war it had been one of Britain’s great manufacturing centres, producing cars, bicycles and the military equipment which had made it the target for German bombers. In the area of post-war prosperity Coventry flourished; people flocked to the town to man the burgeoning car-industry. Coventry became a by-word for growth and prosperity. But in the past 20 years all that has changed. The reason for decline was a litany of what, in the seventies, because known as the English disease. It was a familiar refrain. Trade union arrogance. Over-manning. Ineffective management. The policies of successive governments of relocating plants to areas of high unemployment - Linwood, in Scotland, and Merseyside - which, of course, had the effect of creating unemployment in Coventry. Once, more than 60% of Coventry's workforce was in manufacturing. Now the figure is 38% and falling.
The echoes of this decline were palpable in the days when Peter and I roamed around Coventry. One day particular remains in the memory. We went to a club for retired service men. Stronger than the fug of cigarette smoke, the smell of beer, the friendship of old comrades, was a sense of a past, real, or imagined. These people spoke of Coventry as though it had been once Shangri-La; a city of plentiful work, safe streets, friendly neighbours. Suffused in this air of melancholia, we spent that evening in a workingmen’s club, filled with people playing Bingo with their unemployment payments. Bingo is a game habitually played by the elderly, but the club was filled with people of all ages, hopeful of winning the mega-jackpot. On a wooden stage at the end of the hall, an elderly man turned a drum, pulled out the numbers, people’s eyes flickering with anticipation, when he called them out. It is in such quiet, undramatic moments that many truths collide; the larger truth of a city in decline; the smaller more prosaic truths of personal loss, disappointment and consolation – life’s small expectations turning on a Bingo number.
The art of photography is to illuminate these more subtle moments, these subtle truths and Peter’s photographs explore them with formidable insight, perception and humour. Looking at these photographs I am reminded of Robert Frank's legendary book The Americans, which peeled away the self-serving complacency of Eisenhower’s America in the 1950s to reveal another country of corruption, vanity and a disenfranchised underclass. Peter’s England is a different story to Frank’s America, of course, but he approaches it with the same vitality, acuteness and freshness of vision. Writing the introduction the novelist Jack Kerouac described Frank as ‘Swiss, unobtrusive, nice’. Unobtrusiveness and niceness - these may not seem obvious attributes for a photographer, but they are surely among the most valuable.
I can think of no higher compliment than to borrow Kerouac’s words and say of Peter Bialobrzeski that he is German, unobtrusive, nice. And that he knows England.
Note: Peter Bialobrzeski was a participant in the Unclear Family photographic workshops in Crook (County Durham), Amiens (Northern France), Luby (Czechoslovakia) and Borbek, Essen (Germany). He brought this exhibition to Side Gallery in 1993, having spent the previous year looking at England, trying to capture the legacy of Margaret Thatcher: images of both the North and the South, of poverty and affluence. The Elizabeth in question is the Queen.