Chris Kelly’s Columbia School Portraits, 1996
It is my pleasure to publish Chris Kelly‘s portraits of an entire class at Columbia Primary School, Columbia Rd, Bethnal Green. Distinguished by extraordinary presence and insight, these tender pictures taken a quarter of a century ago are the outcome of a unique collaboration between the photographer and the schoolchildren. Chris has been taking photographs for education and health services, and voluntary organisations in the East End for almost thirty years, and these astonishing timeless portraits illustrate just one aspect of the work of this fascinating photographer.
I like myself because I am smart and cool and my name is Rufus and Rufus means red one and I really like to play with my friends.
My name is Abdul. I am eight years old. I was born in 7.10.88 and I like trainers called keebok classic.
When I grow up I want to be a singer and travel around the world. My name is Jay and I am eight years old.
My name is Imran. I am eight years old. I like going to school. I like drawing. My sister Happy gives me sweets.
Hello my name is Salma and I was born in 1988. I am eight years old. I like to go to Bangladesh. At school I like Art. I go to Columbia Primary School. And my teachers name is Lucy.
I like myself because I am smart and cool. My name is Ibrahim. My age is eight years old.
My name is Jamal. I go to Columbia School and I am eight years old. I enjoy reading and art and the new book bags. I am special because there are no other people like me.
I’m eight. I like to play. My mummy loves me. My name is Shumin.
I am special because I am good at reading and maths. I am good at running. I am eight years old and I am year three. My address is London E2. My best friend is Rokib. My name is Kamal.
My name is Kamal Miah. I like chocolate cake with chocolate custard. I love computers at home. I learn at Columbia School. Before school I drink fizzy drink and I eat chips. My date of birth is 13.10.88. My best chocolate bar is Lion. My best colour is dark blue. I’m good at maths. Speling group is C.
I am eight years old. My name is Nazneen. I like doing maths and I like doing singing. I have three sisters. And I have lots of friends.
My name is Paplue. I like football and I like fried chicken because they give me chicken. I am eight.
My name is Rahima. I was born in October the eleventh. I’m eight years old. I go to Columbia School. I live in number thirty.
My name is Halil. I am eight years old. I like to play with my three game boys. I like to see funny films.
My name is Litha. I like chocolate. I was born in London. I am eight years old. I live in a flat. When I grow up I want to be a hairdresser.
My name is Robert. I am eight years old and I live in London E2. I like where I live because I have lots of friends to play with.
My name is Rajna. I’m good at running. I do writing at home. And I’m the middle sister.
I am eight years old. I go to school. I play in the playground and my name is Dale.
My name is Sadik. I’m eight years old. I am quite good at football. I practise with my uncle.
My name is Rokib, I am eight years old. I am special because I can read and write and I can do maths and I can be thoughtful and helpful.
My name is Shafia. I am eight years old. I have two sisters. My big sister is called Nazia and my baby sister is called Pinky.
My name is Shokar. I like kick boxing and swimming and I like football.
My name is Urmi and I like going to Ravenscroft Park. I have a black bob cut, browny skin and black eyes. I am eight years old.
My name is Wahidul. I am eight years old. My favourite prehistoric animals are dinosaurs and I like reading and science.
My name is Yousuf. I want to be a computer designer. If I want to be a computer designer I have to be an artist as well.
My name is Ferdous. I am eight years old. I go to Columbia School. My favourite thing is playing games. My date of birth is 10.12.88.
My name is Akthar. I like to go to Victoria Park. I am eight years old.
Hello my name is Fahmida. I am eight years old and I was born in 1989. I like to play skipping and Onit. I like going to school. In school I like Art.
I go to play out with my friends. I go to the shops with my mum. I go to my sisters new house. My name is Ashraf and I’m eight years old.
My name is Fateha. I go to school. I like art. I am eight years old. I am lucky that I’ve got a good art teacher.
Photographs copyright © Chris Kelly
Chris Kelly hopes to make contact with the subjects of these pictures again for the purpose of taking a new set of portraits. So, if you were one of these children, please get in touch with chriskellyphoto@blueyonder.co.uk
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Night At Spitalfields Market
Although they were taken only thirty years ago, these photographs by Mark Jackson & Huw Davies preserved in the archive at Bishopsgate Institute, seem now to be images from the eternal night of history – with fleeting figures endlessly running, fetching and carrying, pushing barrows from the flaring lights out into the velvet blackness, where a bonfire burns beneath the great tower of Christ Church, Spitalfields, looming overhead.
Mark Jackson & Huw Davies were poets with cameras, aware that they were in an epic world with its own codes and customs, and they recognised the imperative to record it before it disappeared. No one asked them and no one paid them. As recent graduates, Mark & Huw shared a tiny flat and worked, as a courier and in a restaurant respectively, to buy film and subsidise their project. Each evening they took the last tube to Liverpool St Station and spent the night at the market, taking pictures and befriending the traders, before going straight back to work again in the morning, often without any sleep.
Like many of the most inspiring cultural projects, this remarkable body of photography was the result of individuals pursuing their own passion. Mark & Huw were committed to record what no one else was interested to look at. Neither became photographers and their greater project to record all the London markets was reluctantly abandoned when they went off to pursue other careers, but their Spitalfields Market photographs are unrivalled in the photography of markets.
Photographs copyright © Mark Jackson & Huw Davies
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Mark Jackson & Huw Davies at the Spitalfields Market
Ivor Robins, Fruit & Vegetable Purveyor
Snowmen Of Yesteryear
With snow forecast in the capital, I thought I would look back and consider the transient souls of those long-gone East End snowmen of yesteryear that I was able to immortalise with my camera.
At first I came upon them in yards and gardens, but before long they were scattered all over the parks and open spaces, lonely sentinels with frozen smiles. Snowmen are short-lived beings and many of those I photographed were just completed, only to be destroyed shortly after my pictures were taken. Yet when I returned later, I often found they had been reconstructed, and – as others appeared in the vicinity and the creators sought to be distinctive – a strange kind of evolution was taking place.
Chris Brown, Illustrator
Chris Brown has long been a favourite illustrator with his superlatively elegant and droll linocuts (currently gracing branches of Gail’s Bakery for Christmas), so I am thrilled that he is exhibiting and giving a lecture about his work at the BLOOMSBURY JAMBOREE at the Art Workers Guild tomorrow, Sunday 11th December from 10:30am.
CLICK HERE TO BOOK FOR CHRIS BROWN’S LECTURE AT 12:15pm ON SUNDAY
We need volunteers at the Jamboree on Sunday – if you can help, please email spitalfieldslife@gmail.com
WHAT WE DO TODAY EXISTS BY WHAT WE DID YESTERDAY
Chris Brown introduces his lecture
“My talk is divided into two parts. The first speaks of the present and discusses recent work.
The second part explores the past – why I do what I do and how I came to do it. I shall be talking of my influences, discussing the books I have read and the things I have seen, with examples of my early work dating from when I left Middlesex Polytechnic in 1976, my time at the Royal College of Art (77-80) and my work as an illustrator in subsequent years.
When I started, I felt burdened by the work I did previously, spending months worrying that I would not be able to do something as pleasing or as good again but, as I grew older and perhaps more confident, I grew comfortable with my talent and, in some areas, my lack of talent.
I have learnt that the past is not a burden but something to enjoy. Often now, I look back and think ‘that was not so bad’ and pat my younger self on the back.”
Fleet St
David Hockney
Little Venice
Kew Palace
Ewelme College (founded by Alice Chaucer, granddaughter of Geoffrey Chaucer in 1437)
Avebury
Portland
Mary Anning
Illustrations copyright © Chris Brown
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The Scholar & His Cat, Pangur Bán
Schrodinger sitting on my desk
I am very grateful to Chris Miles for drawing my attention this ninth century poem written by an unknown monk in Old Irish at or near Reichenau Abbey in what is now Germany. Unsurprisingly, I cannot help but identify with the author.
The Scholar & His Cat, Pangur Bán
(Translated by Seamus Heaney)
Schrodinger sleeping on my desk
The page of Richenau Primer in which Pangur Bán is written
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Schrodinger’s First Year in Spitalfields
At St Paul’s Cathedral In Old London
At midnight on Christmas Eve, I find myself standing inside St Paul’s Cathedral among the the company of several thousand other souls. The vast interior space of the cathedral is a world unto itself when you are within it, as much landscape as architecture, yet when the great clock strikes twelve overhead, my thoughts are transported to the rain falling upon the empty streets in the dark city beyond. I am thinking of these lantern slides created a century ago by the London & Middlesex Archaeological Society for lectures at the Bishopsgate Institute.
Until 1962, St Paul’s was the tallest building in London and, in my perception of the city, it will always stand head and shoulders above everything else. Even before I saw it for myself, I already knew the shape of the monstrous dome from innumerable printed images and looming skyline appearances in films. Defying all competition, the great cranium of the dome contains a spiritual force that no other building in London can match.
A true wonder of architecture, St Paul’s never fails to induce awe when you return to it because the reality of its scale always surpasses your expectation – as if the mind itself cannot fully contain the memory of a building of such ambition and scale. No-one can deny the sense of order, with every detail sublimated to Sir Christopher Wren’s grand conception, yet the building defies you.
Although every aspect has its proportion and purpose, the elaborate intricacy expresses something beyond reason or logic. You are within the skull of a sleeping giant, dreaming the history of London, with its glittering panoply and dark episodes. The success of this building is to render everything else marginal, because when you are inside it you feel you are at the centre of the world.
Glass slides courtesy Bishopsgate Institute
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Reading At Burley Fisher Books
Next Thursday 15th December at 6:30pm, I shall be giving a reading in company with my good friends, the novelist Sarah Winman and the poet Stephen Watts at Burley Fisher Books in Dalston, 400 Kingsland Rd, E8 4AA.
Tickets are free – click here to book
Portrait by Patricia Niven
Sarah Winman is the author of four novels When God was a Rabbit, A Year of Marvellous Ways and Tin Man. Her most recent is Still Life, a story that begins in 1944 with the chance meeting on a Tuscan roadside between a young soldier and an ageing art historian. It spans fours decades and moves from the East End of London to Florence.
Portrait by Lucinda Douglas Menzies
Stephen Watts‘ most recent books are Republic Of Dogs/Republics Of Birds & Journeys Across Breath, Poems 1975-2005. A film of The Republics was made by Huw Wahl & two exhibitions related to Stephen’s work were held at PEER Gallery, Hoxton & Nunnery Gallery, Bow. A Book Of Drawn Poems is forthcoming.
