Sandra George’s Portraits of Working-Class Dignity
The unsung Black British photographer’s work is the complete opposite of so-called poverty porn.
EDINBURGH, Scotland — A White boy lifts a match to a cigarette. A Black girl floats on a scratched seesaw. A rock band strums from a pickup truck parked between towering housing projects, posters pasted to the door reading, “End Unemployment. GET THEM OUT!”
Sandra George’s intimate portraits of urban Scottish life during the 1980s and ’90s reveal a world of both resilience and enduring solidarity. In one photograph, a student is arrested at an anti-nationalist protest; in another, a bouquet is thrust into the air at a rally upon Nelson Mandela’s release from prison. Brown, Black, and White women gather at a community center to discuss their shared grievances; “Every Mother is a Working Mother,” a placard declares in cursive calligraphy.
A Black British photographer whose own minoritization abetted her empathy for outsiders, George never received mainstream acclaim for her prolific body of work. Sandra George: Start from the Level, a new show at the City Art Centre of Edinburgh, makes a convincing, if overdue, case to change that. The largest exhibition of George’s work to date, Start from the Level reveals the activist-artist as a sensitive witness to private and public life in the throes and aftermath of Thatcher-era privatization in the United Kingdom. Though the subjects of George’s social documentary photography come from a range of racial backgrounds, many dwell or work in neglected housing projects. “Rich Scum fuck off” is graffitied on the door of a unit in Edinburgh’s Craigmillar public housing complex from 1994. In Leith, across town, a pile of timber and abandoned mattresses becomes a makeshift playground, from which four boys beam down as though they’ve scaled a mountain.
