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The Review - FEATURE
 

Donna and Dee 1975


Kilburn Festival in the early 1970s


Kilburn Festival in 1975


Anna Bowman
A community's photo album

Anna Bowman photographed a changing area in the early 1970s, writes Sunita Rappai

KILBURN in 1972 was a community facing rapid change. Massive new investment in the area – one of the poorest in London – promised to change the face of the old neighbourhood forever.
For an idealistic young student from Australia, it was an exciting place to be.
Anna Bowman had arrived in London to enrol on a two-year photography course at Ealing College and found herself digs in Birchington Road.
“It was an area in transition,” she reminisces, from her home today in Cotleigh Road, Kilburn. “A lot of buildings were being pulled down. People were moving around a lot.
“At the same time there was a very vibrant feel because people were trying to make the best of the situation. I was part of a group of people who were organising things in the park – summer festivals, the first Kilburn festival, Saturday music events.
“It was a time of great uncertainty but there was a lot of hope involved as well.”
Armed with her twin-lens Rolleiflex camera, the young student decided to start to photograph the changes she saw happening around her.
For the next four years she wandered freely with her camera, photographing everything from children playing in the run-down houses to revellers partying at the Kilburn Festival.
“I was conscious that it was a special time so I wanted to document what was going on,” she says. “Everyone was very poor at that time. It was difficult to get money for film. I was very lucky that the house I lived in had the space to have a darkroom.”
Gradually Bowman became more involved with other projects – she is mainly a video artist these days – and put away her camera and the photographs. Buried in various boxes around her house, they were only re-discovered two years ago while she was researching a video project.
“I started looking through them and I realised I wanted to show them again,” she says. “Every Friday for a year I went to a darkroom in Brixton to print them up. I had a few hundred pictures, some I had never seen before.
“It was actually quite emotional. Some people had died – others I had lost contact with. It was like an archaeology project – but my own personal archaeology project.
The result – an exhibition of Bowman’s photographs called Kilburn Life – is currently on display in the Gallery at Swiss Cottage Library.
There is timeless quality to the images – and a sense of optimism that shines through the sometimes grinding poverty. For Bowman, the photographs, striking though they are, are less art than a “bit of social history”.
“They are not great photographs in the sense of being like Cartier-Bressson,” she insists. “But what they do have is an individuality. They are very direct and they show that sort of vibrancy that was there.
“People did not have a lot of money at all. There were people with no baths, no hot water, a lot of overcrowding. What I do think though was that there was a tremendous sense of freedom. To go out and do things and make changes. You would not have that now.”

• Kilburn Life at The Gallery, Swiss Cottage Library, 88 Avenue Road, NW3. Until April 1. Call 020 7974 6522.
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