The informer

A new book of iconic photographs taken by Mike Abrahams delivers 30 years of British history. Peter Dench finds out more

- Peter Dench

A resounding applause fills The Four Corners Gallery and Arts Centre dedicated to independent photography and film-making. Fifty or so people have travelled from across the country to east London to see and hear photographer Mike Abrahams speak about his new book, This Was Then (Bluecoat Press 2024). Abrahams doesn’t take questions and politely directs people towards the complimentary bar. Surveying the dispersing crowd I spot renowned picture editors, archivists, publishers, editors and photographers. They are of an age and of a time. This Was Then is a collection of Abrahams’ photography from 1973 to 2001, through Prime Ministers Heath, Wilson, Callaghan, Thatcher, Major to Blair. It was his time and his visual contribution to this era of British history.

Born in South Africa, Abrahams left aged two and grew up in Liverpool, UK, where he began taking pictures as a teenager as a way to explore his surroundings. ‘In 1971, as a 19-year-old, I worked on ambulances, taking the elderly and disabled to day centres. Entering some of the last occupied houses in condemned streets awaiting demolition was shocking and it was to some of these streets that I returned later with my camera,’ he writes in the introduction to This Was Then.

During the afternoon I spent listening and chatting to Abrahams, it’s evident he’s moulded by the bomb-damaged, slum-ridden, impoverished environment of his youth. Driven by an unwavering curiosity, decades of wandering British streets to see what’s around the corner and behind doors of those living day to day in marginalised societies has followed – Blackburn, Bradford, Barrow-inFurness, London, Liverpool and Glasgow.