posted on 02 Mar 2022

Saltley, Birmingham 1978 & WELD Carnival Handsworth 1979 by Brian Homer

In January of this year I was delighted to get the chance to review a new photozine from the Birmingham-based photographer and designer, Brian Homer. The elegant booklet format contained black and white images that were a portrait of Birmingham in the 1970s taken from the photographer’s archive. These photographs essentially presented the crumbling inner-city landscape as its central protagonist – this was the life of a city in bricks and mortar rather than flesh and blood.

Following that review, I was thrilled to be given two earlier publications by the same photographer in a very similar format that were printed in 2019 in limited editions of just 150. Both of these earlier collections – featuring life in the Birmingham inner city areas of Saltley and Handsworth – firmly put people and community on centre stage.

Saltley, Birmingham 1978 features black and white photographs that were taken as part of a mid-1970s Community Development Project (CPD) – an early iteration of what we might now call a regeneration project or, in ultra-modern parlance, a bit of ‘levelling-up’. Working class Saltley – perhaps most famous for the coking plant, Saltley Gate, that played such a significant part in the 1972 miner’s strike - was then, and remains now, a place of deep poverty and astonishing cultural diversity. Immigrants drawn to Birmingham for work in the heavy, metal-bashing industries found themselves gravitating to the inner city areas where housing was comparatively cheap because of its frequently dilapidated condition.  Brian Homer’s photographs capture not just these incomer communities but the residual white working class families that remained in the area where their parents and grandparents had lived for generations.

The documenting of these lives in black and white prints feels entirely right in terms of capturing a mood – these were, after all, lives often lived in black and white or shades of grey. As a young man in Birmingham at the time these photographs were taken, my memory of these inner city areas where I also lived, is that it was a life lived in constant drizzle.

WELD Carnival, Handsworth 1979  captures a specific community development event organised in Handsworth by two primary school teachers. As Brian himself notes in the introductory remarks:

“The images give a flavour of the project and its rather anarchic (in a good way) approach, where art was used to give young people a vision of the possibilities beyond the confines of the inner city.”

I have to say that this collection is by some distance my favourite – it seethes with life and good humour. This is typified by the cover shot – two rather grubby youngsters decked out in police helmets being watched over by a rather doubtful bobby: the boys are too young to be punks but they are most definitely imbued with the spirit of that movement!

You can find some of the images from these two booklets in the gallery below but if you want to see more, visit Brian Homer’s excellent website and take a more leisurely look at the photo archive – it’s fabulous.

 

Terry Potter

March 2022