Between 1968 and 1972, whereas males walked the floor of the moon and hippies dropped acid, a younger man in his mid-twenties was photographing a wholly totally different world: the dire residing circumstances of the city poor in England and Scotland, the place little had modified because the Victorian period. The pictures Nick Hedges made throughout this time have been utilized in a nationwide housing marketing campaign that will have a profound impact on the British public and assist to make the case for a change within the regulation. This alteration finally arrived with The Housing (Homeless Individuals) Act of 1977, which was a significant step ahead in authorized protections for homeless folks.
For Hedges, who died on 8 June, aged 82, this work cemented his conviction that images may very well be a robust instrument for social change. The images have been proven in a travelling exhibition organised by the Victoria & Albert Museum in 1974, however weren’t seen once more in public for an additional 40 years. After this the photographer acquired some belated recognition, however none of his later works eclipsed the pictures of slum housing that marked an early highpoint in his profession.
Hedges was born in Bromsgrove within the West Midlands in 1943. Aged 24, whereas learning images at Birmingham Faculty of Artwork, he started a challenge capturing the circumstances of individuals residing within the metropolis’s most dilapidated housing inventory, constructed cheaply to accommodate the fast inhabitants progress that got here with the commercial revolution a century earlier.
He was shocked by the fabric poverty he noticed, but additionally by the sense of hopelessness of the households. Many lived in slum circumstances that had been condemned earlier than he was even born, but had been left in excessive deprivation whereas authorities nationwide discovered how one can sort out the issue of as much as three million individuals who wanted pressing rehousing.
New tower blocks Hockley, 1968
Nick Hedges
Pictures as activism
The pictures from this final-year artwork college challenge have been seen by Des Wilson, the director of Shelter, then a brand new charity campaigning for an pressing response to the disaster. Hedges was employed by Shelter straight from faculty as a researcher and photographer. He was tasked with travelling England and Scotland to seize the human penalties of slum housing for the charity’s Face the Details marketing campaign, which urged the federal government to vary its definition of homeless to incorporate these residing in property deemed “unfit for human habitation”.
Hedges knocked on doorways and met and recorded folks in Birmingham, Bradford, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Leeds, Liverpool, London, Newcastle, Salford and Sheffield. Males, nonetheless, not often appeared within the marketing campaign. Hedges mentioned that they typically felt too ashamed to be photographed, however he additionally noticed that Shelter gravitated in the direction of photos of girls and kids, which have been seen as extra sympathetic.
After leaving Shelter in 1972, Hedges spent the remainder of the last decade as a contract documentary photographer, working for Incapacity Revenue Group, Mencap, Inhabitants Countdown, the BBC, Penguin books and New Society journal. He was one among three photographers commissioned to make an exhibition titled Drawback within the Metropolis by the Royal City Planning Institute which was proven on the Institute of Modern Arts, London, in 1976. The present, with its name for higher session and participation by the neighborhood within the planning course of, apparently didn’t go down effectively on the institute’s annual convention.
Alongside working as a contract photographer, Hedges additionally shot unbiased initiatives, gravitating in the direction of organisations resembling Half Moon Gallery in London, Aspect Gallery in Newcastle and Camerawork and Ten.8 magazines, which, like him, noticed images as a type of activism. In 1976 he was awarded an Arts Council Fellowship to {photograph} employees in factories and steelworks within the West Midlands, spending two years on the challenge.
The outcomes have been exhibited at Half Moon, and by the British Council in Paris. A e-book, Born to Work, was revealed three years later. In 1979, he was commissioned by Aspect Gallery to doc the fishing business in North Shields, and all through the second half of the Seventies he continued his challenge, I’m a Believer, photographing the rites and rituals of the various totally different religions practised in Wolverhampton.
From 1980 Hedges taught at West Midlands Faculty, turning into topic chief in images on the College of Wolverhampton in 1988, and retiring in 2003. In 1981 the photographer donated his remaining assortment of his Shelter negatives, contact sheets, and prints to Library of Birmingham.
Humanity and scale
20 years earlier he had given 1000 prints to the then newly opened Nationwide Museum of Pictures, Movie & Tv in Bradford, which is now the Nationwide Science and Media Museum. Hedges, presumably wanting to guard the themes of the pictures, which included many kids, from the stigma of poverty, put an embargo on the pictures being seen by the general public.
Nevertheless, the archive was seen by Hedy van Erp, an unbiased curator from the Netherlands, who was invited to place collectively an exhibition on the Media Area gallery on the Science Museum, London, in 2014, by which period the embargo had been lifted. The present was titled Make Life Price Dwelling.
“Though these images have develop into historic paperwork, they serve to remind us that safe and ample housing is the idea of a civilised city society,” Hedges mentioned on the time. “The failure of successive governments to offer for it’s a unhappy mark of society’s inaction. The pictures ought to enable us to rejoice progress, but all they’ll do is hang-out us with a way of failure.”
The exhibition introduced an virtually forgotten facet of latest historical past again to the fore, and introduced newfound recognition to the photographer. Van Erp tells The Artwork Newspaper that she was shocked to see such photographs from western Europe made over the last quarter of the twentieth century, recalling that she “needed to put them away after a few hours with them, as a result of they have been simply too heavy”. Nevertheless, the curator additionally says that the humanity and scale of the work typically took her breath away. For her, the distinction between Hedges and a few of his higher identified contemporaries is that, “he spoke extensively with all of the folks he photographed. He bought to know them”.
The involved documentary photographer
In 2015, Hedges contributed to a spin-off documentary, Slum Britain: 50 Years On made by Channel 5, evaluating the circumstances of 1968 with the modern-day housing disaster. The identical 12 months, his images have been proven in a bunch exhibition titled, Not But. On the Reinvention of Documentary and the Critique of Modernism, staged by the Museo Reina Sofia, which acquired a considerable assortment of classic prints of his work.
In 2021, Bluecoat Press revealed Hedges’ work for Shelter in a e-book titled Dwelling, alongside one other titled Road. And now his pupil work has been introduced along with the Shelter images for an exhibition at Birmingham Again to Backs, a Nationwide Belief property that preserves a few of the final remaining housing that Hedges photographed greater than half a century in the past. Dwelling within the Shadows runs till the top of September.
Paul Hill, a up to date of Hedges and an influential photographer and instructor who was partially accountable for him getting the 1976 Arts Council Fellowship, says the picture maker epitomised the involved documentary photographer. “He was involved not solely about injustice in society, however on the earth of labor,” Hill explains.
“He confirmed a juxtaposition of issues within the manufacturing unit office—posters on a wall, birthday playing cards strung up. You bought a sense that these have been actual areas…The images transcended the data that was captured by the digicam. And that juxtaposition, that ambiguity, is a robust approach to inform a narrative with images.”
Rupert Nicholas Wilmore (Nick) Hedges; born Bromsgrove, Worcestershire 31 December 1943; married Diana Roberts (two daughters; marriage dissolved); died 8 June 2025.
