Photographer Tricia Porter presents a series of striking black and white images which document the everyday lives of those living in inner city Liverpool in the early 1970s. The series began as a collaboration between Porter and her husband, who was keen to document the changes in the local Liverpool community – which welcomed the two artists into their homes, businesses and personal lives.

The images derive from a period in which Liverpool’s tightly knit communities found themselves disrupted and displaced by city development, which resulted in the 1981 Toxteth Riots. The individuals captured have therefore been labelled as part of a series of social phenomena, and so it is Porter’s aim to make a “positive and meaningful statement about my neighbours, who had all too often been treated as statistical fodder.”

Divided into Liverpool 8 and Some Liverpool Kids the exhibition depicts unnamed and well-known residents at work and going about their daily business – for example social campaigner Margaret Simey and famed Liverpool sculptor Herbert Tyson Smith at work in his studio at the very same Bluecoat – and young people socialising, working and at parties. In the same space, these series give an honest depiction of multicultural Liverpool forty years ago – a very different vista to today.

Tricia Porter: Liverpool Photographs 1972-74,  until 5 July, The Bluecoat, School Lane, Liverpool, Merseyside L1 3BX.

Find out more at www.thebluecoat.org.uk.

Credits
1. Tricia Porter, Boys playing in the Anglican cathedral grounds, 1974. Courtesy of the artist.