In the past I called Mark Page a ‘Gobshite’. He may be that and his blog might make me laugh out loud more than any other on the web, but his words also hold the conscience of this nation to account.
Today is a shameful day for Britain, a day in which we elected a racist to sit for us in the European parliament. Mark Page saw it coming because he knows that just because a problem is no longer spoken about, just because it does not affect you, does not mean it no longer exists.
Take the trouble to get to know Mark Page; he has important things to say. This post was written by Page yesterday:
Chris Killip’s “Youth on wall, Jarrow, Tyneside 1976
This is an iconic image, a famous image and for me one of, if not the best British portrait ever taken. It’s been read as a metaphor for Britain at the end of empire, at the end of it’s industrial reign. Britain awaiting the huge political and social change that was to arrive with Thatcher a couple of years later.
I’m sure it’s all of those things and more.
I’ve always related to it on a personal level. The subject could have been me. The lad would have been about the same age as I was then. I had them boots, that shaved head, them pants, “Birmingham bags” we called them. Swap the location from Jarrow to another Northern town in terminal decline, in my case Widnes and Mr Killip could have taken my picture.
It’s also a picture of vulnerability, perhaps a metaphor for nation, I see it on a more literal level and I don’t think that that makes it any less of a work of art.
This image stirs a sense of nostalgia, as I’ve mentioned, the clothes etc. It also drags back darker memories of a permeable sense of despair, of fear for the future heightened by the onset of manhood.
The current recession and rise of hate party’s such as the BNP stir up memories from the same time. Young lads like the one shown above were easy pickings for the jackals of the right. Back then it was the NF and the youth division of Oi! now replaced by the BNP or the more “user friendly” UKIP. They are still looking for recruits and finding them, that picture could be shot again with a kid wearing tracky’s we have new economic hardship and a new load of foreigners to blame.
Not that anyone needs to make a new image, Killip’s picture stands the test of time but I challange any of you photographers who are reading this to go sum up our current scary moment in our nations history so perfectly with one shot……
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