George Shaw on Words & Pictures

I discovered Quadrophenia (1973) by The Who after seeing the film in 1980 (35). I didn’t care much for the music at the time but the booklet of photographs that came as part of the album rolled all my interests into one clear and complete work of art. What’s more, I could actually own it. Pete Meaden described Mod as 'an aphorism for clean living under difficult circumstances' and we see this tension being played out again and again in Ethan A. Russell’s and Peter Townshend’s photographic story. The image of Paul Weller’s post-Jam band The Style Council took this aphorism to heart. The cover of Our Favourite Shop (1985) shows Weller and

Mick Talbot, suited and loafered, browsing elegantly amid the bric-abrac of a bygone age (36). It would have been my favourite shop too. I discovered British Image 1 (1975) in a second-hand bookshop shortly before I went to art school (37). Together with a host of other distractions, it was images like these that encouraged me to abandon painting and take up a camera. I fell in love with the square format of the book, with its functional iconography and title, and, most of all, with Daniel Meadows’s beautiful photograph of three lads with their pigeon (a Kes sequel of sorts). The book could have been a record with a photo of the band members.

I probably discovered Homer Sykes’ Once a Year (1977) when I was at art school (38). Sykes takes the discipline of documentary photography and makes something strange and unfamiliar out of it. I found Nick Knight’s Skinhead (1982) in a record shop (39). It begins with a history of the skinhead subculture and ends up with some disturbing photographs of London youth in the early 1980s. These images of a world I saw around me had none of the strange nostalgia and far away innocence I enjoyed from the 1960s and 1970s. They too, soon came to look like images of the past; sadly, as today’s news shows us, their politics did not end up being buried forever.

Much of my early attempts at art school would fit neatly into the box labelled pretentious. Perhaps this was what drew me to the books of B. S. Johnson. Writing throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, his experimental projects seem at odds with the kitchen sink narratives of the period. His first published novel, Travelling People (1963), has black pages to indicate the subconscious. Albert Angelo (1964) has holes cut into it, so that the reader can see through to other pages. The Unfortunates (1969) is often referred to as the 'book in a box' because it contains unbound sections that the reader can shuffle into any order (40). Consequently,

the book turns into an object. However, in the middle of reading Johnson, I am always struck by how commonplace and ordinary and even sentimental his stories are. The Unfortunates begins when the narrator is sent to report on a football match, which triggers quite banal memories of a dead friend.

Johnson does have a knack for great titles. Very few can beat Aren’t You Rather Young to be Writing Your Memoirs? (1973) (41) and Everyone Knows Somebody Who’s Dead (1972), which in this pamphlet form looks like a 7-inch single from the early 1980s (42). Johnson summed up his literary ambitions in the preface to Aren’t You Rather Young to be Writing Your Memoirs?, in which he suggested that traditional methods of storytelling were redundant and were in fact merely the telling of lies. I sympathise with his quest for a kind of truth. Ageing and death sit at the centre of much of his work, as does humour, and — despite his Hancockian pomposity — a humble and attractive self-awareness. The text of Street Children (1964), which should be the most sentimental of books, twists and turns its way into a dark fairy tale set in London in the early 1960s (43). It comes as no surprise to find that Johnson took his own life in 1973.