Colin O’Brien, who has died aged 76, was a self-taught photographer; he was inspired by the work of Bert Hardy and Bill Brandt, which he saw as a child in Picture Post magazine, to begin documenting everyday, working-class life in London in the 1950s. His vast photographic archive of around half a million negatives is a unique visual record of the changing nature of the capital over the past 60 years, the highlights of which were collected in the book London Life (2015). He is also known for his series of images of Travellers’ children, taken in the 1980s. “I’m fascinated by the ordinary,” he said. “Famous people and famous things just don’t interest me. The ordinary is of as much importance as the extraordinary.”
O’Brien took what he called his “first real photograph” in 1948, aged eight. In it, his two boyhood friends, Raymond Scallionne and Razi Tuffano, pose moodily, as instructed by him, against a parked car in Hatton Garden, Clerkenwell, central London. Soon afterwards, his uncle, Will, a cab driver, gave him a basic contact printing set that allowed him to develop his photographs without using a darkroom. As a boy, O’Brien shot with a Brownie box camera on the bustling, working-class streets of Clerkenwell, his neighbourhood, which was then called “Little Italy” because of the Italian immigrants who had settled there and opened cafes and food stores.
From the start, he seemed to understand instinctively that his area, with all its everyday human dramas, reflected the energy of the surrounding city. He photographed his father, Edward, at the breakfast table before a shift at nearby Mount Pleasant post office, and his mother, Edith (nee Kelly), a housewife, making tea and shopping for hats, as well as neighbours and children as they went about their daily lives. One of his black and white photographs of a London skyline at night dominated by factory chimneys was used on the cover of the first edition of Alfie (1966), a novel by his friend Bill Naughton from his earlier play, which was also made into two films.
As a teenager, O’Brien was a resourceful and imaginative photographer, shooting an extended series of images from the family’s top-floor flat in Clerkenwell, which he later called “my first window on the world”. From there, he photographed people passing by on the street below as well as Roman Catholic religious processions and even the aftermath of car accidents. His images show the streets in bright summer sun and covered in winter snow. He often shot late into the night, capturing lone stragglers making their way home past hoardings advertising Guinness and Batchelors Peas.
Inevitably, his wanderings took him further afield to Soho and the West End, where he often photographed at night, using a 1931 Leica purchased by his parents from a chauffeur, who claimed to have found it in the back of his car. In the 60s he also hung around outside football grounds, intent on capturing the faces of supporters pouring into the terraces or perching on walls and railings rather than the drama on the pitch. His snatched portrait of West Ham and England star Bobby Moore is memorable for the crowd of children that surrounds him, each intent on their autographs. It captures a moment when English football began to shed its working-class roots for the glamour and riches of today’s global, corporate game.
In 1987, O’Brien spent time among a community of Travellers in London Fields, creating a gritty series that was later published as a book to critical acclaim. “Those kids were so free,” he said later. “They were impoverished but not unhappy. I think they’re tender shots and there’s a real sense of togetherness in some.”
The London that O’Brien captured in the 1950s and 60s already looks impossibly distant in its mix of street traders, factory workers and scruffy children in short trousers and hand-knitted jumpers. The old-fashioned family shops have now been replaced by chains and purveyors of artisan goods. In the retrospective of his work, London Life, the photographs taken in the 80s and 90s chronicle the beginning of the hyper-gentrification of the capital that has rendered swaths of O’Brien’s East End virtually unrecognisable.
Born and raised in Clerkenwell, O’Brien rarely moved further afield than Hackney, in east London, where he settled in the 80s. His mother even brought Colin, an only child, back from evacuation in Cornwall during the Blitz, as she hated it so much, saying she’d “rather take a chance”. “I wasn’t Don McCullin going off to war or David Bailey photographing celebrities,” O’Brien said. “I was quite provincial. I didn’t go south of the river and I didn’t travel.”
He failed his 11-plus, but after attending Sir John Cass school in the City, he found a job in media resources at the City Literary Institute, where he was given time off to study and gained a BA in photography at Westminster Polytechnic, and an MA in photography and advertisingat London College of Printing.
Though his work appeared fitfully in the Guardian and other newspapers, O’Brien seems to have evaded the dictates of the commercial world. He funded his street photography with various office jobs and by working as a technician at St Martin’s School of Art, before he began teaching at the London Institute (now University of the Arts London). In the 70s he took photographs of plays and actors, including John Hurt and Steven Berkoff, at the King’s Head theatre, Islington; the Bishopsgate Institute recently restored thousands of those images. In 1982 he married Jan, who survives him.
His publisher at Spitalfields Life Books described him as “a purist who managed to resist any commercial imperative or editorial intervention … resolutely pursuing his own personal interests”.
In his 70s, O’Brien continued to photograph in and around Hackney. “Two things will stop me doing street photography,” he said in a recent interview. “Either I die, or London stops changing.”
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