Rethinking Social History: the Photography of Janet Mendelsohn

During the 1960s, Balsall Heath, located in the heart of Birmingham, experienced a great deal of social change. It was a space which housed many of Britain’s post-war immigrants and, consequently, saw a multicultural shift. Immigrants, mostly from the Caribbean and South Asia, reshaped Balsall Heath’s urban terrain, establishing new businesses, cafes, restaurants and venues. 

Yet, amidst this prosperity, the area also witnessed the symptoms of urban decay. Contractors demolished thousands of houses in the late 1960s as part of the government’s plans for slum-clearance. Balsall Heath suffered from abject poverty and a rise in illicit activity. 

Neighbours were wary of its high level of prostitution, leading to legal intervention from city administration. Varna Road, for instance, saw hundreds of women arrested for soliciting their bodies. Infamous for its practices, the area not only attracted the unwanted attention of journalists and authorities, such as the police, but also attracted the eyes of researchers studying at the University of Birmingham.

Falling Apart: 'The Street' by
Janet Mendelsohn (p. 313).

Janet Mendelsohn was a post-graduate student at the newly established Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS), Birmingham. Between 1967-69, she spent her time working on a project involving the social aspects of inner-city life. Her photography made her methodology unique. She sought to document the lives of the typically excluded in Birmingham’s public sphere – namely, immigrants, prostitutes, pimps, and the working poor. 

In a 2017 article, Kieran Connell, who co-curated Mendelsohn’s work at Birmingham’s Ikon Gallery in 2016, analyses the historical context of her photography. Drawing on the research agendas of scholars on post-war Britain, Connell argues that Mendelsohn’s ‘social eye’ grants a glimpse into how the street was the ‘key site [where] social changes of postwar Britain were played out’ (p. 304). Built entirely on Mendelsohn’s material, Connell observes big twentieth-century changes at the local level.

'Kathleen outside
the Bar' by Janet
Mendelsohn
(p. 311).

Mendelsohn’s working relationship with Kathleen, a Balsall Heath resident, is one example of her 'social eye' for the streets. Kathleen, a sex-worker, who was the subject of Mendelsohn’s picture-essay published in the early 1970s, was twenty-three at the time of Mendelsohn’s pictures and clearly developed a close relationship with the American photographer during her time in the area. 

Mendelsohn’s street photography sought to explore a ‘day in the life’ of subjects on the margins of society (p. 320). She allowed her audience a unique view into the life of Kathleen, representing her with a certain dignity, Connell says, ‘in a manner that prostitutes [were] rarely afforded’ (p. 322). 

Mendelsohn exhibits this perspective in a photograph she captured of Kathleen and her daughter. Terraced housing dominates the foreground of the scene. Within the background, a power plant looms like a mountain over the street. Both Kathleen and her child return the camera’s gaze with playful gestures. Here, Kathleen is a mother, embodying the role of a sweet-hearted carer amidst the abject poverty of her surroundings.  

'Kathleen and her daughter S.' by Janet
Mendelsohn (p. 323).

Mendelsohn paid attention to the ignored in society, and thus countered typical attitudes which viewed prostitution as the failing story of the ‘fallen’ women in society. Ideas changed after the publication of the Wolfenden Report in the late 1950s, which Connell argues signaled a shift in ‘the discourse around prostitution away from a perception of prostitutes as the victim of circumstances such as poverty and towards a focus on what was seen as the conscious choice made by women to embrace the life of a prostitute for financial gain’ (p. 307). Even so, the ‘whore stigma’ still pervaded the norms and values of British society. Mendelsohn steered away from these attitudes; instead, she treated Kathleen as an equal – as someone with an important story to share.

Mendelsohn’s work with Kathleen is moving. Her work also serves to show the transformation of attitudes within academia. Mendelsohn’s ‘social eye’ arose from developments within the university. Her choice to study in Birmingham was significant: by the late 1960s, Birmingham received extensive attention from sociologists as a ‘race-relations’ capital in Britain (p. 308). Hence, many academics were keen to study the same issues Mendelsohn explored in her own work. 

The CCCS’s own developments also shaped the character of Mendelsohn’s ideas. Seminars led by Stuart Hall assigned sociological texts as well as many post-structuralist pieces concerning photography, such as Roland Barthes’ translated essay on ‘The Rhetoric of the Image’ (p. 308). These changes, to a degree, influenced Mendelsohn’s own practices.

Further, Mendelsohn’s documentary photography, with a focus on low-order culture, reflected the research agendas of radical new scholars within the New Left. Personal politics and research interests went hand in hand at the CCCS, and the work of historians, such as E. P. Thompson at University of Warwick (leaving in the early 1970s due to what he called the commercialisation of the University system), also represented the change in New Left research agendas at a wider level. Thus social history’s renewed focus is heavily tied to Mendelsohn’s work. Connell’s title ‘Historians in the Streets’ is appropriate – this was Social History as we know it today at its very roots.

Source:

Kieran Connell, ‘Race, Prostitution and the New Left:  the Postwar Inner City through Janet Mendelsohn’s “Social Eye”’ History Workshop Journal, 83 (2017), pp 301-40.