This Was Then
Mike Abrahams is a photographer based in London who worked over 40 years as a freelance photographer documenting the lives of ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances, political changes, and turmoils through a lens focused on people’s ability to find meaning, develop resilience, highlighting their struggles, and ability to survive. Spanning over three decades and shot between 1973 and 2001, This Was Then, is a photo book published by Bluecoat Press. It presents day-to-day life while reminding the viewer of the macro perspective and socio-political events taking place in Britain during those years that directly influenced people’s lives.
The tension between the micro and the macro lies at the heart of Mike’s work and is driven by an authentic interest in people and an understanding of why certain choices are made, the resulting reactions, and the interpretation of events that create a narrative. Mike explains, “I suppose the only impact I hope to have is to produce images that are not stereotyping people, pictures that I hope show empathy and also some intimacy.” Genuine care and interest are the underlying themes in Mike’s work. They enable to see hardship through a different prism and encourage empathy for the less fortunate characters we meet on the pages of the photo book.
We discuss the way time can shift our understanding and interpretation of photographs. Mike describes an image of a young boy he met in Northern Ireland in the streets of Ardoyne six years before discovering this boy’s photograph in a newspaper, revealing that he was a bomber who killed nine innocent people in an IRA attack targeting the UDA West Belfast Brigade’s headquarters. We speak about communities and the ability of a photographer to enter those, learning firsthand about people’s lives. Mike remembers his encounter with a group of young people while on assignment for The Observer Magazine. Twenty-three years later, he learned that most of the people he met were already dead after a struggle with drug addiction that affected the misfortunate area of The Ford Estate in Wirral.
Photography by Mike Abrahams Published by Bluecoat Press Essay by Stephen Mayes Designed by Tom Booth Woodger Design assistant Safia Mirzai Printed by MAS Matbaa
Get your copy at Bluecoat Press
First Edition
Hardcover with tip-in
300x245mm
160 pages with over 100 images
Tri-tone printing
‘The process of photographing is just intuitive. I suppose the only impact I hope to have is to produce images that are not stereotyping people.’
This Was Then
Hi Mike, it is lovely to meet and speak about your recent photo book, This Was Then, published by Bluecoat Press. The book spins three decades of your career, images taken between 1973 and 2001, collected into one narrative about Britain through your eyes. Could you tell about the process and your work with Bluecoat Press on selecting the images to create a cohesive story?
I had spent a lot of time during Covid going through the archive of my British work, first making quite a broad edit in Lightroom and then printing out hundreds of small prints that I laid out on the floor. I then stuck a tighter edit onto boards around my studio from which I started making a sequence. From there, I started laying out a rough dummy in InDesign. I probably went through about 10 or 12 versions. Then, when I met with Tom, the designer at Bluecoat, we started again. Tom had some ideas that we tried out, but in the end, we settled on something pretty close to my original ideas.
‘I was not interested so much in the fact that people threw stones but why a community responded in such a way.’
The Narrative
What I find striking going through the images is watching how a story unfolds and perceiving elements that immediately create a connection to politics, social movements, and historical events, which come in the form of a subject holding a newspaper, soldiers with rifles walking the streets, police opposing crowds. We watch the black community, worker strikes, economic crises, unemployment, punk culture, and Nazi groups in the historical events. Political issues come in contrast to the documentation of the lives of ordinary people and their struggles, creating a dialog between the macro and the micro perspectives. What is important for you when taking a photo in terms of considering the impact it might have?
That’s a complicated one. I start from the basic concept of what interests me which I suppose is quite simply empathy with the people I chose to photograph, the political and social struggles that they are confronting. For example, in 1981, the world’s media were all focused on the wedding between Prince Charles and Lady Diana. I was not at all interested in that, but what I was interested in was what the people of Toxteth in Liverpool would be doing on that day. The community in Toxteth had already responded to the institutionalised racism of the Merseyside police with violent rioting in which over 100 buildings had been destroyed, over 400 police officers were injured, and 500 arrests had been made. I was not interested so much in the fact that people threw stones but why a community responded in such a way. Anyway, on the day of the Royal Wedding, Toxteth erupted once more with battles that emulated medieval warfare with one young man dying after being rammed by a police Land Rover. I chose to photograph the strength and warmth of the community at the heart of this story — their daily lives.
That has always been very much my approach wherever I chose to photograph. Similarly, I chose to photograph one small neighbourhood, Ardoyne in Belfast where I became deeply embedded in the community. It’s a small community of some 11,000, a Catholic and Nationalist area surrounded by Protestant and Loyalist neighbourhoods. During the Troubles, some 99 residents of Ardoyne died at the hands of Loyalist paramilitaries, the British Army, police, and security services. I wanted to understand daily life there.
I tend to just walk the streets and discover what I find. The process of photographing is just intuitive. I suppose the only impact I hope to have is to produce images that are not stereotyping people, pictures that I hope show empathy and also some intimacy. I also hope they challenge preconceptions and emotionally connect in the way that I have managed to.
‘He had a look of confidence yet vulnerability, freckles, and a droopy eye, a striking face.’
The Theme
Stephen Mayers writes in the essay on the book, “With the notable exception of the police, not many of the people represented in this collection of photographs are doing much. They might have just done something and many look like they might be about to do something, but at the precise moment in that flicker of time when the shutter was released there is a great deal of nothing much happening.” This is a beautiful and poetic description of the photographs that once the context is added become striking in their power in connection to massive events unfolding at the time, affecting so many lives. For example, the story you speak about in the foreword of the book — a photo of a lad who turned out to be a bomber. Could you describe how you entered the communities and built connections to take some of the portraits that appear in This Was Then?
That’s very kind of you to say. The picture you are referring to is quite a shocking discovery. As I had mentioned before, I had spent a lot of time in Northern Ireland, probably nearly ten years off and on. When you spend a lot of time in a community, you get to know a lot of people, and they know you, which is quite important, especially in Northern Ireland, where everyone is a little suspicious of outsiders. I was wandering the streets in Ardoyne as I did most of the time, I was there and bumped into this young lad who was helping someone move house. He had a look of confidence yet vulnerability, freckles, and a droopy eye, a striking face. He took a pose that mirrored the hills behind. We parted ways with a smile, and I didn’t think much about him until about six years later.
I saw on the news that there had been a horrific bomb blast in Frizzell’s fish shop on the Protestant Shankill Road. The bomb had been planted by the IRA, and their target had been the UDA West Belfast Brigade’s headquarters, where they believed a meeting was being held upstairs. The bomb exploded prematurely, killing nine innocent people, including two children, as well as one of the bombers and injuring many. This was a devastating human tragedy and an indiscriminate sectarian attack that led to a wave of sectarian killings. Shockingly, it later emerged that the IRA commander who master-minded the attack was a British agent who had passed details onto the security services, who then failed to prevent the attack.
It has also been alleged that the security services actively allowed the botched bombing to put pressure on the more hardline elements of the IRA towards accepting the peace process. Documents also reveal that the agent may have even had custody of the bomb the night before the attack, allowing time for the bomb to be tampered with. Newspapers carried a photograph of the bomber, and I recognised that young lad I’d photographed some six years earlier.
What is interesting is how time can change the way we read a photograph and how a banal moment can become imbued with a greater significance in the future.
‘I, the photographer who had had the privilege to meet all kinds of people and who had had the chance to be in all kinds of places, and he, the survivor of a life on drugs who had had one day when a photographer from a national newspaper had been interested in his life.’
From Then to Now
The way you show communities and observe people’s lives comes from a subjective perspective and is accepting of diversity and inclusive to all kinds of stories that unfold with an emphasis on the meaning of life and the importance of personal stories. What was the most impactful story you encountered that has a remaining echo lasting to this day?
Across the water from Liverpool sits Birkenhead and the Ford Estate. In 1981, on a grassy mound, about fifteen young people were hanging around, smoking a little weed and drinking. The sun was shining, and it was a lazy afternoon. I joined them and hung out with them and took photographs. I was visiting the Ford Estate on assignment for The Observer Magazine to accompany an article about a young girl who had received an award for her poems about life on the estate. The pictures made a nice spread in the magazine with a large double-page spread opening with one of the pictures from the grassy mound.
Twenty-three years later, I revisited with John, one of the lads on that grassy mound. We met up with another four survivors of that time, and the events of that weekend were recounted in great detail. Of those fifteen young people, only five were still alive. All had been affected by severe drug addictions. The Ford Estate was one of the toughest on the Wirral with high unemployment, vandalism, and crime. John described how everyone got strung out and developed drug habits, “You need more and more, so you start resorting to crime, dealing or begging and borrowing.“ Six months after my visit in 1981, heroin had replaced weed and alcohol and had ravaged the lives of those young people.
One of those survivors remembered our time together in great detail as we wandered around retracing our steps from twenty-three years ago. I, the photographer who had had the privilege to meet all kinds of people and who had had the chance to be in all kinds of places, and he, the survivor of a life on drugs who had had one day when a photographer from a national newspaper had been interested in his life and had paid him attention, and it had had an impact on his life.
That return visit with John was probably the most humbling moment of my career. Today, the number of those who survived has diminished even further. I think of those lost lives and the tragedy that drugs brought to that community daily.
