Childhood Streets

First edition of Childhood Streets by Graham Ovenden (1998)

First impression

Large format hardback in as new condition 

Comes with a dust jacket

About

Although Ovenden was mostly unaware of the history of photography at the time, these images parallel other great photographs of metropolitan streetlife - for example, those of Doisneau, Brassa, Cartier-Bresson, Helen Levitt, and above all Bill Brandt. Whitechapel Shoe Shop, 1963' has the surreal quality of Atget's turn-of-the-century views of Paris shop fronts, Stepney, 1959' has the suffused air of a nineteenth-century calotype, while Old Woman, Stepney, 1957' strongly echoes The Crawlers' from John Thompson's "Street Life of London" series shot a century ago. In addition to these masterfully confident images, there are the many images of young girls (which would become the focus of Ovenden's later work as a painter): skinnydipping in the park, trying on clothes at the street markets, shopping and running errands with, or for, their parents, minding their younger siblings, or just playing in the street alone and in playgroups.