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.”
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