NUMBER 22 1972
David Hepher (1935 – )
Details
- Dimension
- 193 X 244 CM
- Media
- OIL ON CANVAS
- Accession number
- P1567
Summary
Starting in 1969, David Hepher was to spend five years painting suburban house fronts in south London. Number 22 is one of a row of Edwardian semi-detached houses in Townley Road, East Dulwich. Its front garden, panelled door, stained glass and bay windows are typical of a nostalgic kind of architecture that mushroomed in the interwar period around British towns and cities, alongside expanding transport networks.
Born in Redhill, a commuter town in Surrey, Hepher studied at south London’s Camberwell School of Art, then the Slade, where he recalls the prevailing principle was that what you painted didn’t matter so much as how it was done. When he left, he immediately started painting the view from where he was living, and made subject and style inseparable. The consummate anthropologist, he picks apart the phrase, ‘an Englishman’s home is his castle’ by grounding his observations in years of research. After making drawings and photographs, he recreated the houses of Townley Road at half their actual size. This façade is plotted in minute detail, from picket fence and lonely shrub to moulded glass in the upper windowpane and the folds of the net curtains (installed to keep out prying eyes) – all extremely conformist details. The series is titled according to the house numbers, emphasising uniformity; here the number plate is cute and curly, but Townley Road homeowners personalise within a narrow theme.
Hepher’s images of suburbia capture the 1970s zeitgeist. By then the modernist housing estates built after World War II, often blocks of flats on a dehumanising scale, were being widely condemned as dystopian failures, whereas home ownership was a sign of upward mobility among the ‘baby boomer’ generation. Classic 1930s homes, once regarded as kitsch and downmarket, had a surge in popularity, as Poet Laureate John Betjeman attested in his BBC documentary Metro-land (1973). At the same time, a wave of television comedies transmitted concerns about suburbia into millions of living rooms. These programmes reconstrued the word ‘suburban’, from a geographical term to an adjective describing a banal state of existence, a cultural desert. Both set in south London suburbs, The Good Life (1974–78) and The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin (1975–79) dip into the regiments of middle-aged middle-classes leading facsimile lives. Reggie Perrin’s absurd situation is encapsulated by his address: he lives at 12 Coleridge Close, an estate identical to the rest except it is named after famous poets. In Mike Leigh’s hit play, Abigail’s Party (1977), a cocktail party exposes angst behind the net curtains over emergent class distinctions: were they lower-middle, aspirational-midde or upper-middle class? Hepher turns the scrutiny full frontal.
Text by Dorothy Feaver
Glossary
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Documentary
The term ‘Documentary’ was not coined until the 1920s, and then used by the British film-maker, John Grierson, to refer to moving pictures. It has a long and continuous history in British photography, reaching back to the invention of the medium. Many critics claimed that the documentary impulse, which can perhaps be best defined as the systematic recording of visual reality for the purpose of providing information and encouraging understanding of the world, is inherent in the medium itself. It was this view which came to be known as the realist paradigm - the belief that a photograph represents a ‘slice of reality’ easily understood by the viewer. This belief governed understanding of photography from the moment of its invention in the era of positivism in the 19th Century, until it was itself subject to interrogation in the 1980s.
Early British practitioners included John Thomson whose visual essay Street Life in London (1876) documented the life of the London poor, and Hill and Adamson who portrayed, in the mid 1840s, the customs and way of life of the fisher folk of Newhaven near Edinburgh. In the early 20th century, following the emergence of documentary film-making and Mass Observation (a study undertaken in the North of England by the anthropologist Tom Harrisson), this new aesthetic found its most persuasive outlet in the mass circulation weekly magazines, such as Picture Post and Life. In time, however, pressure from advertisers combined with the restrictions of group journalism and curtailed the independence of creative photographers, with only exceptional individuals such as Bill Brandt able to survive as both a photojournalist and an independent photographer. His images of Britain’s class-ridden society along with his more experimental nudes, portraits and landscapes had a profound influence on a younger generation and established Brant as a major creative force in the development of modernism in Britain.
Mass Observation was designed to emulate the radical achievements of the worker-photography movement which had arisen in Germany during the 1920s. It proved influential on the evolution of British documentary, especially on those photographers associated with the Side Gallery in Newcastle. The gallery fostered a regional, community-oriented form of documentary practice. Its philosophy was rooted firmly in the notion that an authentic document can only be generated by those familiar with the local community. Photographers associated with Side Gallery included Sirkka Konttinen, Isabella Jedrecyck, Graham Smith, Peter Fryer, Chris Killip and Julian Germain.
It was, however, across the Atlantic that the more enduring legacy concerning the ethics and status of documentary was to be found in the work of the photographers employed by the Farm Security Administration to document the plight of the American rural poor during the Depression. One of its outstanding photographers was Walker Evans whose use of signs and symbols (such as billboards and advertising hoardings) as images of desire created a text or narrative to accompany the careful sequencing of images. The direct inheritors of the photograph as social sign were the American photographers of the ‘social landscape’, namely Lee Friedlander, Garry Winogrand and Diane Arbus whose unsympathetic vision of the American landscape reflected the anxieties of urban life during the booming consumer decade - store fronts, billboards, graffiti and advertising. They chose to portray people, situations and artefacts in a casual and objective way that allowed the viewer to interpret the work freely; a strategy that became known as the ‘snapshot aesthetic’. One of those who experienced many of these developments first hand was the British photographer Tony Ray-Jones. His work was widely reproduced in the 1960s and his book A Day Off (1974) proved a particular inspiration for the generation of documentary photographers who developed in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Relevant websites:
The work of early documentary photographs can be found in the collections of the Royal Photographic Society www.rps.org)
The Mass Observation archive is held by the University of Sussex www.sussex.ac.uk/library/massobs/
The work of the Side Gallery can be seen at www.amber-online.com/gallery/
The archive for the Farm Security Administration is now in the Print and Reading Room Collections of the Library of Congress in Washington www.loc.gov/rr/print -
Painting
Work of art made with paint on a surface. Often the surface, also called a support, is a tightly stretched piece of canvas, paper or a wooden panel. Painting involves a wide range of techniques and materials, along with the artist's intellectual concerns effecting the content of a work.