George Shepherd

George Shepherd was born in Eccles, Salford, in 1933, into a working-class family of mill workers going back generations. Photography got hold of him early on, and by the time he was about 18 he was taking a camera everywhere, photographing whatever was in front of him.

From the early 1950s through to the mid-1970s, the camera was how Shepherd made sense of the places he knew best. He shot, developed, and printed everything himself, turning the spare bedroom into a darkroom. The pictures aren’t about grand scenes or big events. They’re the streets of Salford and Manchester, the factories and pubs, the faces he grew up around, the places he went with his dad, and the spots where he later worked and socialised. It’s his world, put down on film exactly as he saw it.

Now in his nineties, Shepherd says photography has always been his own kind of memory work — a way of holding on to the past without dressing it up. A selection of his photographs was shown in a solo exhibition, A Trip Down Memory Lane, at Salford Museum in 2019. In 2023, to mark 75 years of the NHS, British Culture Archive and Shepherd donated a framed print he took of NHS maternity nurses in 1967.

Archival prints by George Shepherd are available exclusively here.