Watching Liverpool Pass By
When I first began photographing Liverpool in 1972, corrugated metal hoardings were a familiar feature of the city’s streetscape, concealing bomb-damaged sites, derelict buildings and empty plots awaiting redevelopment. Liverpool was entering a period of profound change. The decline of its traditional port and manufacturing industries was reshaping the city, while the closure of the southern docks in 1972 marked the end of an era. Amid the remnants of the past, demolition and redevelopment were becoming part of everyday life.
Nearly fifty years later, in this 2021 photograph, corrugated metal appears again, but this time it has been transformed into a canvas. A family of elongated, cartoonish creatures, with their wide eyes and curious expressions, stares out from the hoarding. In front of them stands a woman, solid and three-dimensional, caught momentarily in the street.
There is an intriguing contrast between the two. The woman is physically present but temporary; the painted figures are flat, yet they may outlast her. She will walk away, disappearing from the scene, while the characters remain on the metal until the building work moves on and the hoarding itself is removed. The photograph holds these different kinds of existence in a delicate balance: the fleeting presence of a passer-by, the temporary life of a building site, and the uncertain permanence of an image.
Perhaps there is another layer to this encounter. I find myself identifying with those wide-eyed painted creatures, watching Liverpool pass by, observing its transformations and bearing witness to the gradual disappearance of familiar places. Like them, I stand outside the action, looking on as the city continually reinvents itself. My camera, too, takes an ordinary, passing moment and gives it a kind of permanence.
The irony is that nothing in the photograph is truly permanent. The woman moves on; the hoarding will eventually vanish; even the street will change. Only the photograph remains, preserving a moment that can never be repeated.
After nearly half a century of photographing Liverpool, perhaps this is part of what keeps me looking: the knowledge that the everyday world is always slipping away, and that, occasionally, a camera allows us to hold on to a little piece of it.
