George Shepherd was born in Eccles, Salford in 1933 to a working-class family of third-generation mill workers. Photography was George’s hobby from a young age. At the age of 18, he began taking photos and carrying his camera wherever he went.

From the early 1950s to the mid-1970s, George photographed, developed, and printed his own images in black and white, using the spare bedroom in his house as a darkroom. He was drawn to the places, buildings, and people of Salford and Manchester. These were places he had either visited as a child with his own father or where he socialised and worked.