Made across Liverpool and Merseyside from the mid-1980s into the 1990s, and concentrated around Everton, Vauxhall, Kirkdale, New Brighton and Liverpool’s Pier Head, Rob Bremner’s photographs document children, families, friends and older residents during a period of industrial decline, unemployment and extensive urban change.
Those conditions are present throughout the pictures. Terraced streets, demolished buildings, vacant land and worn public spaces provide the setting for many of them. Yet Bremner did not approach Liverpool as a collection of social problems, and he did not photograph its residents as illustrations of hardship. The work developed through repeated visits, conversation and direct encounters, giving clothes, hairstyles, gestures and expressions as much weight as the wider conditions visible around them.
Bremner is characteristically modest about his intentions. “I wish I could say I was a socially aware photographer campaigning against Thatcher’s Britain,” he has said, “but really, I just liked being there. I liked the people.”
That statement is key to understanding the work. Its significance grew from sustained attention to everyday life, not from a predetermined political argument.
Bremner was born in Wick, Caithness, in 1964 and grew up in a large working-class family. He left school at sixteen without qualifications and began working in a local garage, a job that offered little sense of direction. Photography arrived through a chance meeting with a press photographer from Inverness, which led to a place on a six-month youth training scheme and his first sustained opportunity to work with a camera.
In 1983, he moved south to study photography at Wallasey School of Art. It was the only art school that had accepted him, but the move would define his practice. Liverpool was nothing like the fishing town in which he had grown up, yet the connection was immediate. “Merseyside has felt like home ever since I moved there,” he later recalled. “I come from a large working-class family and felt an affinity with the people I started photographing.”
That affinity did not grant automatic access, but it shaped his approach. Bremner walked the same streets, spoke to residents and returned regularly. Over time, he became a familiar face to many of the people he photographed.
Photo © Rob Bremner / British Culture Archive.
At Wallasey, Bremner encountered Tom Wood and Martin Parr, two photographers who would become central figures in British documentary photography. Wood was teaching at the college, while Parr lived nearby. Both were photographing New Brighton’s promenade, beaches, pubs and cafés as the town experienced economic decline and changes to its traditional resort economy.
Bremner helped Wood in the darkroom and accompanied both photographers while they worked. Watching them was an informal education in observation and persistence. Their practice demonstrated that a substantial body of work did not require distant subjects or exceptional events. It could emerge from returning to the same streets, watching carefully and recognising the significance of ordinary encounters.
Bremner began photographing New Brighton himself, and his pictures from the resort already contain the qualities that would define the later Liverpool work. People frequently meet the camera directly, sometimes confidently, sometimes with hesitation or amusement. They are aware of being photographed but rarely controlled by the photographer.
Wood, Parr and later David Hurn were important influences, but the direct and economical approach to portraiture was Bremner’s own.
After Wallasey, Bremner was accepted onto the documentary photography course at Newport, led by David Hurn. The course had become an important training ground for photographers committed to extended projects built on research, repetition and sustained contact.
While studying there between 1985 and 1987, Bremner continued photographing Liverpool, concentrating on Everton, Vauxhall and Kirkdale. These areas had been hit hard by unemployment, housing decline and the contraction of industries that had sustained generations of workers. The docks and the city’s manufacturing base were shrinking, while entire neighbourhoods faced demolition and disinvestment.
Bremner understood those conditions, but he did not arrive with a fixed narrative about what the photographs should prove. “It was tough times,” he recalled, “but I found everyone to be warm and friendly. On rainy days they’d ask me in for tea.”
He photographed people living within economic and political change rather than reducing them to evidence of it.
Photo © Rob Bremner / British Culture Archive.
Bremner’s method was straightforward. He would walk until he found someone he wanted to photograph, choose a suitable background and ask permission.
“I know how to take portraits in the sense that I’ll look for a background and people,” he explained, “but basically I just ask people if I can take their photo. You’re hanging around the same area, so you get to know people.”
He gave very little instruction. He might position someone or tell them not to smile, but he did not attempt to direct every gesture or expression. The people in the photographs decided how to face the camera, where to place their hands and how closely to stand beside one another. Some performed for him. Others remained guarded, amused or openly resistant. That balance between direction and independence gives the work much of its character.
The simplicity of the method should not be mistaken for a lack of formal thought. Walls, doors, shopfronts and damaged buildings are never neutral backgrounds. They locate each portrait socially and geographically while the subject remains at the centre of the picture. Clothing, hairstyles and posture connect the work to the visual culture of 1980s Liverpool, but the photographs never become exercises in period style. Their subjects have a psychological presence that exceeds the historical detail around them.
Photo © Rob Bremner / British Culture Archive.
Photo © Rob Bremner / British Culture Archive.
One of Bremner’s best-known photographs was made in Kirkdale in March 1986. He had been photographing demolished buildings and was walking along a street as the light began to fade. A group of children followed him from one end of the road to the other, repeatedly asking him to take their picture.
“They followed me saying, ‘Go on, mister, take our photograph,'” Bremner recalled. “Eventually, I gave in and just said, ‘Stand there and don’t smile.'”
The resulting image is far from an orderly school-style group portrait. Joseph, the red-haired boy on the left, looks directly at the camera. At the front, Melanie turns her face away while her brother James attempts to twist her head back towards Bremner. “I’ve got some other photographs where Melanie was a little bit more cooperative,” he explained, “but here she was going, ‘No, I don’t want to look at the camera!'”
Bremner exposed an entire roll of film on the group, making twelve frames. This was unusual. Film and processing were expensive, particularly in colour, and he would normally make only one or two exposures of each subject. Using the entire roll allowed him to follow the encounter as the children’s positions, expressions and relationships within the frame continued to change.
Each exposure offered a different arrangement, but the strength of the photograph rests on the children’s refusal to be fully organised by the camera.
“Those kids made the photograph really, not me,” Bremner said. “I just chose the background and where the light was.”
Joseph later went on to become a professional boxer. More broadly, the photograph reflects a defining quality of Bremner’s archive. The people he photographed were never anonymous types. They had names, relationships and lives that continued beyond the moment the picture was made.
Photo © Rob Bremner / British Culture Archive.
Bremner returned frequently to Everton and Vauxhall, photographing children in the street, couples outside their homes, groups of friends and older residents. His access depended on ordinary social contact. He talked to people, accepted invitations and spent enough time in the area for his presence to become understood.
“They were so nice to me in Everton,” he remembered. “I’d have dinner in their houses and there was an old guy who used to invite me round if it was raining.”
On another occasion, he went drinking with a group of dockers and accidentally left two college cameras in the pub. “When I went back the next day, I found they’d been put behind the bar for me.”
The story is characteristic of how Bremner describes the period: not as a heroic or campaigning photographer, but through ordinary encounters, mistakes and acts of trust. These relationships were the working process. He photographed openly and relied on people agreeing to take part.
This is particularly evident in photographs such as Johnny Crummie and Pat Smith, Vauxhall, 1987, Lisa and Tricia, Vauxhall, 1987 and the portraits of older women made in the area. The subjects stand before the camera with composure, humour or deliberate formality, occupying the frame on their own terms. The damaged streets around them remain visible but never overwhelm them.
After completing the Newport course in 1987, Bremner returned to Merseyside and tried to establish himself as a freelance photographer. A local gallery showed interest in exhibiting his Everton and Vauxhall work, but the commission fell through. Paid work was scarce. He lived in a small bedsit, signed on as unemployed and continued photographing whenever his resources allowed.
Unable to afford conventional colour film, he began buying out-of-date rolls of 35mm black-and-white cine stock: cheap, unpredictable and enough to keep working.
During this period, he photographed extensively around Liverpool’s Pier Head.
“At that time it was just a run-down bus station where people waited for the ferries across the Mersey,” he recalled. “It was the last stop for most routes, and older people with their free bus passes would get off there.”
Rather than photographing the waterfront’s monumental architecture, Bremner documented the Pier Head as a transport interchange and social space.
“There was a café where the staff were friendly, and you could sit all day nursing the same cup of tea without being asked to move on,” he said. “It was cheaper than heating a home. Danny, who ran the burger stand, used to give me free burgers.”
That detail gives the Pier Head pictures their context. What might appear to be a place of transit also functioned as somewhere to find warmth, company and a way of passing the day. The terminal, café and river provide the setting, but the life of the space is carried through faces, gestures and small exchanges between people.
Photo © Rob Bremner / British Culture Archive.
Bremner later received a grant from the Prince’s Business Trust and joined the Enterprise Allowance Scheme, a government programme intended to help unemployed people establish their own businesses.
The support allowed him to build a freelance practice, with commissions from trade unions, social housing organisations and other clients connected to labour and working-class communities. The assignments required different forms of planning, but his approach remained direct and centred on the people involved.
Regular work remained difficult to find, and Bremner has described this period as one of the lowest points in his career. He nonetheless continued working independently for many years.
Around fifteen years ago, he returned to Scotland after both of his parents developed dementia. Following his mother’s death, he remained in Wick to care for his father. The move interrupted the Liverpool project, but not his connection with the city or the people he had photographed.
Photo © Rob Bremner / British Culture Archive.
The later circulation of Bremner’s photographs became an important extension of the original work. Before Facebook and Instagram were widely established, he began sharing the pictures through Liverpool community websites. People who appeared in them, or who recognised friends and relatives, contacted him with names, memories and further information.
“I’ve got names for just about everybody in those 80s pictures,” Bremner explained, “either because they’ve been in contact, or people who knew them have.”
The process transformed the archive. Photographs that might otherwise have remained identified only by place and date became connected to specific individuals and family histories.
In one instance, Bremner shared a portrait of an older man and was contacted by a member of his family. The man had always refused to be photographed, even at weddings, and Bremner’s portrait was the only picture of him they had ever seen. What began as a brief street encounter became part of a family’s visual history.
Bremner has reflected on why so much ordinary experience went unrecorded at the time. “Everyday life wasn’t recorded much then, particularly in deprived areas,” he said. “You’d only buy a roll of film if you were going on holiday, or maybe if it was somebody’s party.”
His photographs preserve what family albums, newspapers and official records often missed: children playing in the street, friends outside houses, older residents waiting for buses and couples posing together. Unexceptional at the time, decades later these images carry considerable personal and historical weight.
The archive has not remained fixed at the moment the shutter was released. As the pictures have circulated through community websites, exhibitions and publications, people have been named, relationships identified and memories attached. Its meaning continues to develop through the communities represented within it.
Photo © Rob Bremner / British Culture Archive.
Photo © Rob Bremner / British Culture Archive.
Bremner continued photographing Liverpool into the 1990s, documenting a city entering another period of cultural and urban change. Photographs such as Wood Street, Liverpool, 1996 extend the work beyond the immediate conditions of the 1980s. The city centre, its nightlife and its public identity were changing, but Bremner remained interested in how people occupied the street and presented themselves to the camera.
The later work prevents the archive from being reduced to a single account of Thatcher-era decline. Across more than a decade, Bremner photographed childhood, friendship, unemployment, leisure, ageing and changing forms of public life. His method remained consistent: approach people directly, work with available light and allow the character of the encounter to determine the picture.
In recent years, Bremner has resumed photographing, including a commission in Salford for Elle. His portraits retain the directness and attentiveness of the earlier Liverpool work.
He has also spoken about returning to the city. A number of people have suggested that he rephotograph his subjects from the 1980s, but his interest lies elsewhere.
“I’m more interested in documenting kids today,” he explained, “because everything changes, the fashions and so on. And then those photographs will become memories for them in another thirty or forty years.”
Photo © Rob Bremner / British Culture Archive.
Photo © Rob Bremner / British Culture Archive.
Liverpool in the 1980s was frequently represented through unemployment, political conflict and urban crisis. Those conditions are essential to understanding the period, but they were not the totality of life in the city. Bremner’s photographs show people living within those circumstances rather than existing only as their victims. His subjects retain control over how they stand, look, dress and respond to the camera.
He did not photograph anonymous representatives of a class or neighbourhood. He photographed Joseph, Melanie, James, Johnny, Pat, Lisa, Tricia and many others whose names have since been recovered or confirmed. That specificity keeps attention on the individual lives contained within the archive.
The work is neither sentimental nor detached. Its authority comes from time spent, streets returned to and encounters allowed to develop without excessive control. Bremner chose the light, the background and the moment, but the individuals in front of his camera gave the photographs their character.
Made decades ago, the pictures now operate as social history, public memory and personal record. A haircut, a jacket, a street corner or a group of friends, ordinary at the time, has become part of a much wider social story. Their lasting importance rests not only in what they reveal about Liverpool, but in the attention Bremner gave to the people whose lives shaped the city.
Rob Bremner is represented by British Culture Archive. His Liverpool and Merseyside photographs form a cornerstone of the archive’s collection of British documentary photography.
Photo © Rob Bremner / British Culture Archive.
Photo © Rob Bremner / British Culture Archive.
