Whitechapel 1970s - Part One

During the early 1970’s the Liverpool-born photographer Ron McCormick, lived in Spitalfields, Whitechapel with his family in Princelet Street, in a very basic flat owned by a Jewish merchant. He used his camera to document the lives of local people from the established Jewish and emergent Bangladeshi communities, at work, play, in daily tasks and in their homes.

The visual empathy of his photographs is so powerful because, like many locally based Whitechapel artists before him such as David Bomberg, Mark Gertler and the painter and poet Isaac Rosenberg, he drew inspiration and subject from the local community and the streets of Whitechapel. His photographs during this period echo the ghosts of the people in Rosenberg’s ‘A Ballad of Whitechapel’.
Ron McCormick’s pictures portray an East London neighbourhood that over the centuries had become a place of refuge and settlement for successive communities of arrivants, and during the early Seventies it was changing once more as the Jewish community largely moved elsewhere and newcomers from Bangladesh were moving into the same streets. McCormick’s epochal and often startling images visually echo the spirit of Isaac Rosenberg and his own brilliant use of language more than half a century before.

The photographs date from 1970 and were first exhibited at the Whitechapel Library in 1971 and displayed again in 1972 at the former Half Moon Gallery located in a former synagogue in Alie Street, Whitechapel. It was called ‘Neighbours: Spitalfields to Whitechapel’ and was shown at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1972 in tandem with a solo show of Magnum photographer Ian Berry's Whitechapel work.

NOW OUT OF PRINT, signed, rare

Published by Cafe Royal Books, 2018
36 pages
Introduction by Chris Searle
printed in England
staple bound
14cm x 20cm