Liverpool’s past life remembered as photographer launches new book

Jul 13 2007 by Phil Key, Liverpool Daily Post

CROSBY-BORN, Los Angeles-based photographer Bernard Fallon has photographed some of the biggest names in television, both in Britain and America.

But he always had a soft spot for the photographs of ordinary people he took in Liverpool in the 1960s and early 1970s.

When he heard that Liverpool was to be European Capital of Culture 2008, he decided it was time his pictures were seen again.

“I contacted a lot of people and National Museums Liverpool showed an interest,” he explains.

In the end, they decided to exhibit them during the city’s 800th birthday and they went on show at the National Conservation Centre in Whitechapel.

His exhibition has proved to be one of the most successful ever staged there, with 32,000 going through the doors to see the show which ends on Sunday.

Now Fallon, 58, has returned to launch a book, Bernard Fallon’s Liverpool, Photographs 1967-1974, and today deliver a final talk at the centre at 2pm.

He was delighted with the reaction to the exhibition, surprised that many people in his photographs came to the show.

He was studying at Liverpool College of Art when he took the photographs, having been given a plastic Brownie 127 camera as a teenager.

“I was shy back then but able to stay in the background,” he says. “I found that if I stood with a camera, something happened.”

He often looked for a visual pun, amused to photograph the “naughty” Jacey Cinema showing Playgirl Vampires alongside a roadside Christmas crib. He titled it JC and Jacey.

Another shot, The Long Walk, showed a man walking down an Everton street in which all the houses had been demolished. “I also did another shot with a removal van at the end of the street which amused me.”

A drunken man prone on the grass at the Grand National attracted the attention of Liverpool poet Roger McGough who saw the photo recently. “That was a really good shot of me,” he wrote to Fallon.

His photographs are now to be added to the National Museums collection, while Fallon’s book is published by Bluecoat Press at £9.99.