PHOTOGRAPHS OF THE 70s - THE FEN DITTON GALLERY ONLINE
James Wedge, Girl with Chair
The spirit of the 70s created a festival of freedom fashion and fun. - And photography. Never was the camera so celebrated as in the decade where photographic studios sprung up all over the capital and beyond – and when everyone with an artistic impulse in their body took to the new art of – almost always – black and white images.
Tony Boas photograph of Mary Quant models - the sixties and seventies in fashion
No surprise that the most celebrated figures of the day, the Beatles, came – in British class terms – from nowhere. Photography followed. It was open to working class lads - women were on the other end of the lens - boys who saw a chance to crash the rigid framework of social pigeon- holing . From the top of society – the unknown ‘commoner’ Anthony Armstrong Jones made a smooth way into royal circles with his camera - right across the spectrum to East End boys David Bailey and Terence Donovan– all celebrated in this excellent exhibition . James Wedge, was one of them, a working class young man who served in the Royal Navy but who went on to train at the Royal College of Art (speciality Millinery). (no reference here to the Monty Python ‘Recruiting Office’ sketch) and open two boutiques on the King’s Road Chelsea. By 1970 he was into photography and spent his next thirty years producing images now famous, like the Biba nude below.
James Wedge’s Biba Nude
In 1970 photography was the art form. Chic, lucrative, enviably trendy (Donovan Bailey and Wedge drove everywhere in the fastest slinkiest cars with heavy eyed models in the passenger seat). Yet it also encompassed a social commentary side, slices of British life little seen outside tabloid newspapers. Along with the music Ralph McTell’s ‘Streets of London’ anthem to city poverty, the new photography exposed the more desperate or simply poignant ‘Eleanor Rigby’ side of the glamorous flower children of the age of Liberation.
Brighton Beach by Setsuo Kato
Into this mix came Setsuo Kato from Japan. A photography graduate from Waseda University he was the apogee of ambition at the time, a news and feature photographer. In London he brought an Eastern perspective on the new dawn of change in British society – in music, mores, sex, fashion and of course photography.
Lady with Pigeons by Setsuo Kato
There has never been a time like it and the Fen Ditton Gallery’s exhibiton give an intriguing glimpse of these sexy swinging seventies - alongside their penchant for social concern. Three photograhers who have snapped Britain in a certain light at a special time, these artists are well worth more than a second look.
Prints are available from the Gallery , closed to the public but otherwise open for business in Fen Ditton
