Adelaide Crosby

 

While perhaps best known by-proxy for his relationship with Francis Bacon and Lucien Freud, a painterly pair he came to know and photograph as a fixture of Soho in the sixties and seventies, Harry Diamond’s portraits of the unnamed prove striking for more than their anonymity. Described as devoutly contrarian, with a characteristic air of discontent, Diamond would spend the greater part of those decades, when not working as a stage-hand, photographing Londoners: artists, jazz-bar-frequenting bohemians, and others- like those captured in Some London People. 

Despite the vagueness of the quantifier, the protagonists of Harry Diamond’s Some London People, drawn from the June/July 1973 edition of The London Magazine, have a number of unifying characteristics. His subjects are, categorically, male, and dressed in an eclectic range of winter garb. A tighter shot frames a man in woollens and tweed overcoat, standing furrow-browed beside a closed doorway, while another man holds a ribboned wreath and stands in lackadaisical contrapposto, tie askance. Each is unsmiling; nearly all acknowledge Diamond or meet his camera’s gaze.  

Workmen’s smoke-stacks and rubble piles are met with the polish of an elderly gentleman’s dress shoes (he grasps leather gloves, umbrella) and pavement-side rose bushes, but each portrait maintains a definite urbanity. In Diamond’s obituary, John Pilgrim refers to what he terms his practised ‘working-class ethnic persona,’ and asserts that he was ‘volubly anti-racist.’ Diamond was a militant defender of his Jewish heritage. Yet, he accomplishes a great deal without lingering on the class differences he so plainly highlights, an earnest grittiness in his approach. 

Weary-eyed and distinguished by an unglamorous humanism, the photographs are fragmentary recollections of the dynamism of London life: portraits of city dwellers in movement, fifty years gone by, and familiar figures still.  

Yet, with a half-century since the publication of these images, the facility with which the collection refers to an entirely male cast of characters as London People may seem to the contemporary viewer something between an oversight and an act of intentional erasure; while women, too, were no doubt populators of these same lanes and alcoves, Diamond does not class them, in this particular instance, as appropriate subjects. We are required, instead, to imagine the domain of these Londoners’ counterparts, perhaps relegated, in their absence, to domestic spaces. 

Some emphasise structures, which the human subjects merely foreground, personhood attributed likewise to townhouse façades and shattered warehouse windows. One man has the trappings of a travelling musician or salesman, vested with a hodgepodge of curiously beaded wires and what appears to be a hanging drum. A particularly stripped back composition highlights the interplay of light on a seated man’s illuminated face and hands, the spectral quality of his features and dark, cavernous eyes offsetting one another in shadowy chiaroscuro. 

Another man serves as the photograph’s vanishing point, his face concealed, with the majority of the composition comprised of negative space. His attention is, instead, directed at the opening beneath an entrance to the underground, the boundaries of viewership distinctly established. Despite the lack of subject cognisance in this instance, Diamond’s portraits lack a voyeuristic quality. They contain, too, no documentary agenda beyond the sympathetic representation of the faces of a city alive, in which human and landscape, individual and infrastructure, are interdependent. Indeed, he was no detached observer or stranger to scrutiny, having been himself painted by Freud, and subjected to external view. The dialogue between city and inhabitant is reflected in the collaboration between Diamond and the welcomeness of a hardened, camera facing stare. 

Diamond lived to be 85, with a revived interest in his work following his 2009 passing. A number of  his portraits, spanning his career, belong to the collection of the National Portrait Gallery, where the cutting quality and incisive nature of Diamond’s photographs remains exceptional.
.

Adelaide Crosby is a student at the University of St Andrews, entering her final year of a degree in Art History and English. She specialises in Medieval Christian and Islamic manuscript painting, 20^th century Irish literature, and the folklore and ritual tradition of the British Isles. Alongside her studies, she is a literary editor for Stereoscope Magazine, and the co-founder of a seasonal micro-bakery.

---

To discover more content exclusive to our print and digital editions, subscribe here to receive a copy of The London Magazine to your door every two months, while also enjoying full access to our extensive digital archive of essays, literary journalism, fiction and poetry.