No Pain Whatsoever review – Ken Grant's photographs of wasted Liverpool

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/may/11/no-pain-whatsoever-review-ken-grant-photographs

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Ken Grant said recently that he was guided by the great Czech photographer Josef Sudek's advice to "rush slowly". You often feel the mix of energy and attentiveness in his work, which now amounts to an extensive visual document of life on the streets of Liverpool since the mid-1980s.

"I've photographed in and around Liverpool since I was a teenager, rarely moving more than a few miles from the Mersey," he told the Guardian last year, when one of his images was pictured in the My Best Shot series.

"I tend to go back over familiar ground and photograph the same places repeatedly. Sometimes, I walk all day and find very little; other days, everything falls at your feet. It's rarely straightforward, but then good photographs don't come easily."

There are so many good photographs in this retrospective book that it is difficult to know where to start. Shooting in black and white and following in the formal footsteps of great British documentary photographers such as Tony Ray Jones and Chris Killip, Grant is drawn to the quieter moments of everyday working-class life in Merseyside that nevertheless speak volumes about a place and a time and its people.

Grant began taking photographs during the sustained assault on community that characterised the Thatcher years, and there is a sense of demoralisation at the heart of the book. The backdrop is a landscape in decline: boarded-up streets, derelict factories and houses; pubs with peeling wallpaper, streets – and street markets – that resemble the 1930s rather than the 1980s. Here and there, when he shoots from a low angle and his subjects loom into the frame – a child drinking heartily from a cup during a windswept family picnic, a skinny lad, shirt off, beer can in hand, leaning over a toddler – his work echoes Killip's in its merging of formal skill and visceral subject matter. Often, though, he captures an individual lost in reverie, either alone or in a group, most strikingly in a shot where a hard-looking man with a steel frame clamped to his head, stares defiantly at his camera.

More haunting still are the handful of more visually lyrical images in which the world, even a world as harsh as this one, seems suddenly luminous. One of the most haunting images in the book, literally and figuratively, is of a young boy in a crowded bar, his pale torso bathed in an opaque white light that makes him look like an alien, still and ghostlike, amid the more animated adults, one of whom hovers loudly at his back. You can feel the silence and hear the noise in many of Grant's photographs.

More ghostly still, is his otherworldly image of a discarded pram on a smoky or fog-wreathed wasteland. Stripped of everything but its curved metal frame, it's a landscape straight out of Beckett – right down to the indistinct human figure and the gaunt tree in the background.

Grant prefaces the book with a poem, possibly his own, entitled The Cheap Songs, in which an anonymous man "drinks from a can of ESP Pils" in his forlorn kitchen while listening to You Can't Always Get What You Want by the Rolling Stones. This sets the mood for a surprisingly tender book that evokes the poetry of lost lives in a hard time.

Ken Grant is taking part in PhotoBook Bristol, a weekend festival 6-8 June.