Throughout March Stroud’s Museum in the Park is hosting an exhibition of photographs by acclaimed documentary photographer Shirley Baker.
Shirley worked largely in Salford, documenting life on the streets of the northern town at a time when large areas of housing were being cleared to make way for more modern accommodation.
Exhibition organiser Fred Chance told Stroud Times: “Shirley managed to capture a time when communities were beginning to wonder if they were going to be staying together. So, they really are pictures of communities in transition.”
The Shirley Baker Archive is managed by her daughter, Nan Levy, who was at the exhibition opening on Saturday evening. She explained her mother’s photographic philosophy: “Mum used to say that whilst other photographers were busy photographing the rich and the famous she preferred the trivia of daily life and preferred just wandering on her own around the streets and often was taken by maybe graffiti or peeling paint and nice colours and little patterns on the wallpaper, and she’d stop and photograph that.
“Eventually a person would walk into the frame and there was the shot with the person, and it was inevitably in the best.”
Alongside the main exhibition in the museum’s gallery is a second exhibition, organised by Nailsworth-based Hundred Heroines featuring work by young local photographers on the theme of Nostalgia & Anemoia.
Both exhibitions run until March 30th and can be viewed Tuesday to Sunday. More details here.
Pictures by Hannah Bigwood
