Marketa Luskacova’s street music.

Posted: February 1, 2017 | Author: thelondoncolumn | Filed under: London Labour, London Music, London Types, Pavements, Performers | Tags: Henry Mayhew, Jesus Blood Never Failed Me Yet, London in the 1970s, London street markets, Marketa Luskacova | 1 Comment

ml-musicians-2 Portobello Rd., 1978.

From London Labour and the London Poor by Henry Mayhew, 1851: Concerning street musicians, they are of multifarious classes. As a general rule, they may almost be divided into the tolerable and the intolerable performers, some of them trusting to their skill in music for the reward for their exertions, others only making a noise, so that whatever money they obtain is given to them merely as an inducement for them to depart.

We’ve had the pleasure of showing Marketa’s photographs of London on these pages before, and the pictures on here today are from her new book To Remember — London Street Musicians 1975–1990. This volume draws on Marketa’s intimacy with east and west London, as almost all the images are from the street markets around Brick Lane or those of the Portobello Rd..

ml-musicians-5 Cheshire St., 1978.

Marketa is photographic royalty, a point emphasized by a couple of contributions to the new collection by two of her admirers. Shortly before he died, John Berger wrote the book’s foreword; and, opposite the dedication page, is a 1978 photo of Marketa and her young son Matthew travelling on a bus, an image by Henri Cartier-Bresson.

ml-musicians-4 Cheshire St., 1982.

The world Marketa documented has to a large extent disappeared; apart from anything else, both east and west London have been transformed by gentrification and ‘social cleansing’. Some of the street performers in her pictures look as if they might be illustrations out of Mayhew’s 1850 accounts of London street types; these photographs have a timeless quality. Ironically, the pictures that seem slightly tied to period are the ones of younger, ‘alternative’ street performers, a phenomenon indelibly associated with the 1970s and 1980s.

ml-musicians-8 Covent Garden, 1978.

As I’ve said before, Marketa has an amazing gift for empathy and an ability to get inside a situation without imposing her presence on it. It is clear that she knew many of these performers very well; and if you look carefully, you can see the infant Matthew in a couple of the pictures, his presence a reminder that Marketa had to keep her eye on him as well as the musicians she was photographing. This is photography as a way of life, as a way of being. She was meeting the street performers on an equal footing; she was as much a part of their landscape as they were of hers.

ml-musicians-6 Portobello Rd., 1975.

You don’t need me to tell you how moving these photographs are. In the previous entry we devoted to Marketa I wrote about her astonishing picture of a man singing in the street, which for me is one of the greatest photographs of a performer made by anyone anywhere. A few of the street musicians in her photos have clearly lost hope; but it is the images of those giving their all that are the most poignant. I have no idea whether ‘Caruso’ in the image at the top of this page was a good turn or not – but on the basis of this picture I am prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt. If anyone was ever prepared to ‘fail better’ it had to be him. (I am also, inevitably, reminded of this famous recording which has at its heart the song of a homeless man on a London street.)

ml-musicians-3 Notting Hill Gate Underground, 1975.

ml-musician-1 Bacon St., 1977.

ml-musicians-7 Portobello Rd., 1977.

You can buy Marketa’s book at a few good bookshops (Whitechapel Gallery Bookshop, The Photographers’ Gallery, Camden Arts Centre, London Review of Books, Koenig Books Charing Cross Rd., Pages of Hackney, Donlon Books, Burley Fisher Books, Book and Kitchen, De La Warr Pavilion Bexhill-on-Sea) … or direct from Marketa herself.

marketaluskacova.com

All photos © Marketa Luskacova.

To launch To Remember, Marketa will be discussing her work with Andrew Dempsey on Monday 13 February at Leila’s Shop, 15–17 Calvert Avenue, London E2 7JP. From 6.30 pm.. To reserve a seat (recommended) email info@leilasshop.com.

The lost London of Marketa Luskacova.

Posted: January 5, 2015 | Author: thelondoncolumn | Filed under: London Types, Markets, Pavements, Vanishings | Tags: Jesus Blood Never Failed Me Yet, London in the 1970s, Marketa Luskacova, old Spitalfields Market, The London Nobody Knows | 1 Comment

Homeless men, Spitalfields, 1975. © Marketa Luskacova.

Marketa Luskacova is a Czech photographer who has been largely resident in London since the early 1970s. She first made her name in the late 1960s, with a project documenting religious pilgrims in central Europe and a series of photographs of life in Sumiac, a remote village in Slovakia. These images show life rooted in a barely-changed medieval past, the realities of the 20th century banished by the sheer force of history. This subject matter might seem distinctly eastern European; but when she came to live in London in the early 1970s, she brought her unique sensibility (which I would characterize as a balance of grace, empathy and visual power) to the street markets of the east end.

This milieu is recognisable to us from Don McCullin’s pictures of down and outs, the footage of drunks in The London Nobody Knows, and from other photographers and film-makers who have covered the same turf: the lost and dispossessed in the dark heart of the east end. But the crucial difference between these familiar images and Marketa’s photographs of the same territory is that she wasn’t there as a social anthropologist with a Leica; she was there to buy food. The traders shown in these photographs were the ones she saw every week; they were her friends. Her pictures might be a document of a time and place, but they are also a memoir of a life.

Marketa’s images of London stand as some of the most poetic and heartbreaking photographs ever made of the city. As with all her work, these photographs exhibit an almost supernatural gift for faces. They are also an evocation of a London irretrievably lost to us; these are not scenes you will see in today’s east end. Marketa’s hawkers and street musicians are receding from us, as lost in time as the peasants of pre-industrial Europe. Marketa’s photographs of Whitechapel show a world as remote as the rituals of Sumiac.

Marketa Luskacova’s work has been in some ways neglected in comparison with other photographers of the same generation who have covered the same sorts of material. That said, her work has been widely exhibited and championed by the likes of Roy Strong, Bruce Bernard and John Berger – not to mention erstwhile Magnum colleagues such as Rene Burri, Josef Koudelka, Eve Arnold and Henri Cartier-Bresson, who selected one of her pictures for La Choix d’HCB, an exhibition of his favourite photographs. Her eye is unflinching, but her photographs brim over with feeling that never tips into sentimentality. The final picture here is, for me, one of those photographs which renders any attempt to analyse it utterly trite: I will say that it manages to be as funny as it is sad, and as mysterious as it is beautiful. True greatness. D.S.