BIRMINGHAM.- Ikon presents the largest exhibition to date of photographs by American academic and documentary filmmaker Janet Mendelsohn (b. 1943), from 27 January to 3 April 2016.
Part of a “photo-essay” Mendelsohn made as a student at the University of Birmingham during 1967-69, the photographs depict everyday life in the inner-city district of Balsall Heath, focusing in particular on a sex worker, referred to as Kathleen with whom Mendelsohn formed a close relationship. By using photography as “a tool for cultural analysis”, she provides a unique insight into a community in transformation, shaped by increasing immigration from the Caribbean and South Asia, and affected by the ongoing poverty issues of the time.
Enrolled as a student at the newly-established Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS), Mendelsohn was encouraged by Stuart Hall and Richard Hoggart - then deputy and director of CCCS respectively - to explore ways in which photography could be used in field research. The resulting archive of 3,000 photographs and interviews with her subjects, now held at the Cadbury Research Library at the University of Birmingham, offers a rich seam of primary source material.
Mendelsohn’s photographs document a working class district in flux. This was an area that was about to undergo a relentless process of slum clearance and within two years of her photographing the area, Balsall Heath would become unrecognisable with many of its streets, such as the infamous Varna Road, ceasing to exist. Busy street scenes are interspersed with others inside pubs, cafés and living rooms whilst portraits of individuals, usually contemplative if not melancholic, are counterbalanced by a strong emphasis on family and gatherings of friends, making do and getting by.
During the late 1960s Balsall Heath was Birmingham’s largest red light district, a place of work for some 200 prostitutes. Mendelsohn gives us an extraordinary insight into the lives of these women, their domestic arrangements and personal relationships as well as the nature of their profession. Her images effectively convey an understandable tendency to yield to the temptation of prostitution due to difficult circumstances. We see Kathleen sometimes in her upstairs bedroom window soliciting passers-by, but more poignantly, in one photograph, she is standing, waiting in the street. Her vulnerability is heightened by her silhouette and long sunset shadow thrown onto a pavement made shiny with rain.
Kathleen is a young woman in a dark uncomfortable place, but Mendelsohn’s work does not slip into sentimentality. Other photographs make it clear that she finds Kathleen’s tenacity and defiance remarkable; also the love she has for her children, her sense of responsibility as well as her sense of fun. We see her in hospital, having just given birth to her second child, with the child’s father Salim, a young Asian man; at home with children in bed and at bath time, sometimes enjoying the company of other families and with children playing in a park. There is no suggestion of pity being requested, instead a kind of fatalism that equates to “live and let live”.
