Photograph by Shirley Baker - Manchester 1960s

A boy dressed in a stripy t-shirt and tiny shorts pummels his opponent at the right end of a park bench.

His enemy’s legs are lolling in the air almost comically and his body is dangled in the negative space of the bench with his head lying roughly on the floor and his arm outstretched in protest of his treatment.

The boys wear the same clothes as each other suggestive of sibling rivalry. Every child tends to be necessarily rougher with their siblings than other children – both physically and verbally.

The legs of the bench are worth noting – resembling gnarled branches and one of them in turn carefully echoing the energetic bully’s leg bent, seemingly almost sprouting out of the boy himself and not the bench.

The magic in this photograph comes from the elderly lady sat at the other end, the far left of the bench, impervious to the violent proceedings on the right.

Clad in an immaculate coat and wearing a fetching hat, pearls, blouse with brooch and skirt, she elegantly places her glove on the pew laying claim to her corner of the bench.

The apparent discord in the picture serves to make it a perfectly harmonious documentary photograph.

Shirley Baker, the woman behind this picture, spent her life documenting areas like Hulme in Manchester and her native Salford.

Disappointed by The Guardian’s refusal to take her on as a staff photographer, she determined to make her own photographic oeuvre, documenting the working class communities and particularly women and children.

She also documented the slum clearances which would start to divide the communities making way to high rise flats. Baker spoke of the clearances to The Guardian in 2012:

“There was so much destruction: a street would be half pulled down and the remnants set on fire while people were still living in the area. As soon as any houses were cleared, children would move in and break all the windows, starting the demolition process themselves. There was no health and safety in those days; they could do as they liked. I never posed my pictures. I shot scenes as I found them.”

It is this dynamism that curses through Baker’s pictures. Pulsating with energy the children play amid the ruins enthusiastically and grin toothlessly at Baker’s camera while the darker reality of the clearances takes hold.

The present punitive effects of the Bedroom Tax and Housing Benefit cap could be said to be reflective of this earlier division of working class communities.

Today, 28th August, is the last day to see Shirley Baker: Women and Children and Loitering Men at Manchester Art Gallery. A bank holiday must.

http://manchesterartgallery.org/exhibitions-and-events/exhibition/shirley-baker/