Nick Wynne: Liverpool, Merseyside and North Wales, 1988–1990

Published 12th October 2021

Nick Wynne was still a teenager when he began making these photographs. Made between 1988 and 1990, they document children playing in the street, friends gathering in the city centre, workers on Dock Road and a traveller community living beside Shotton steelworks.

At the centre of the work is a photographer discovering what the camera could make possible. Wynne was painfully shy, and approaching strangers did not come naturally to him. Photography gave him a reason to begin a conversation and the confidence to remain once it had started. “Photography has given me, an incredibly self-conscious, shy person, a voice,” he has said. “Without a camera, there wouldn’t have been any discussions at all.”

Born in Parkgate on the Wirral in 1971, Wynne grew up in a family closely connected to the building trade. His parents ran a small firm and regularly bought land, built a house and sold it before beginning again elsewhere. The family moved several times during his childhood.

His father gave him his first camera when he was eight, a half-frame Olympus Pen that had previously belonged to his grandmother. Wynne took it on a school trip to the Isle of Man. He still remembers opening the camera and noticing the smell of the film emulsion that had remained inside it for years.

Wynne struggled at secondary school due to dyslexia. After leaving a private school, he transferred to a comprehensive but continued to find formal education difficult. He spent increasing amounts of time in the art department and left with an A in art but no other qualifications.

He initially wanted to draw. His direction changed when he discovered an enlarger left by his grandfather, who had been interested in photography. After seeing what the equipment could do, Wynne took it into school and helped establish a darkroom with the support of an art teacher. The experience of watching an image appear in the developer drew him fully towards photography.

It became, in his words, “a lifeline.” Photography offered a form of learning that made sense to him and eventually took him from leaving school with limited qualifications to studying at college and university.

Wallasey and Tom Wood

Wynne completed a First Diploma in Art before progressing to a two-year BTEC in photography at Wallasey. His tutors included Fred Edwards and Tom Wood.

When Wynne arrived, his portfolio consisted largely of fields, sheep and landscapes. He was interested in photography but avoided photographing people because he found it difficult to approach them. Wood understood what was missing.

He took Wynne into the college library and introduced him to photographs by Lee Friedlander, Garry Winogrand and Diane Arbus. Together they looked closely at individual pictures and discussed their construction, meaning and effect. “Tom taught me how to read photographs,” Wynne remembers. “He talked about the pictures and why they worked, and it changed the way I looked at things.”

Wood also invited Wynne to accompany him while he photographed on buses, in Liverpool markets and around New Brighton. Wynne watched how Wood approached groups of strangers, responded when they noticed the camera and carried on working.

“I saw how he could walk up to a crowd of people, stand next to them and start taking photographs,” Wynne says. “They would look at him, he would explain himself and carry on. It inspired me to try to do that myself.”

Wynne began approaching people he would never previously have spoken to. In Birkenhead, he knocked on doors in tower blocks and asked residents whether he could photograph them or make pictures from their balconies. The camera became what he later called a “crutch,” but it also required him to be braver than he felt.

Liverpool and Merseyside

Between 1988 and 1990, Wynne photographed across Liverpool, Birkenhead and the surrounding area. His subjects included boys playing football on Silvester Street, young women in Liverpool city centre, workers taking a break on Dock Road and groups encountered around Bold Street and Kensington.

Liverpool was entering the closing years of a decade marked by industrial decline, unemployment and sustained conflict with the Conservative government. That history forms the context of Wynne’s photographs, but it is rarely their explicit subject. His attention remained with the individuals and situations he encountered during long periods spent walking and looking.

The photographs document streets as places of play and social contact, city centres as meeting points and the working day as something shaped by pauses as well as labour. Wynne worked closely, but without appearing to take control of what was happening. Children continue playing. Friends maintain their attention towards one another. People recognise the camera while remaining part of the situation around them. The camera opened the conversation. The photograph depended on what happened afterwards.

The traveller community at Shotton

One of Wynne’s earliest sustained projects began as a college landscape assignment. Having recently been introduced to a 5×4 camera, he travelled to Shotton in North Wales and began photographing the flat landscape surrounding the steelworks. A small agricultural building in the distance brought him back to the site several times.

On one return visit, he found that Irish Traveller families and New Age travellers had established neighbouring camps there. Wynne began setting up his camera, but some of the children threw stones and adults came out to question why he was photographing them.

He explained that he had been working there before they arrived. As Wynne remembers telling them, “You’re in my landscape. You’re in the way.”

The response softened over the following days, and he was allowed to return. The camp remained at Shotton for approximately five or six months. Wynne visited two or three times each week, initially cycling to the site and later driving after passing his test.

He was 17 and closer in age to some of the children than to their parents. He believes his youth made his presence less threatening, although acceptance still had to be earned. Wynne has spoken candidly about smoking cannabis with some of the adults, who wanted reassurance that he was neither a police officer nor working undercover. Once that suspicion had passed, he was able to spend extended periods at the camp.

A boy named Ben became one of the central figures in the photographs. He accompanied Wynne around the site and grew accustomed to being photographed. “Ben was the one who clung on,” Wynne recalls. “We walked around the site together all day, and he let me photograph him all the time.”

Their familiarity is visible in the pictures. Ben looks back at someone he knows, rather than presenting himself to a visiting photographer.

The Shotton photographs developed through repeated contact over several months. The student who had once photographed fields and sheep to avoid approaching people was now returning several times a week to a community that had initially regarded him with suspicion.

Romania, Wolverhampton and America

In 1989, Wynne travelled by car to Romania, where he photographed Romanian and Hungarian Roma communities. He then gained a place at Wolverhampton, studying photography under Nick Hedges, whose work he already admired and whom he remembers as a generous and supportive teacher.

His time at Wolverhampton lasted only a few weeks. Wynne had already spent two years making photographs and studying photographers, and he quickly became frustrated with the course. His departure coincided with the end of a long-term relationship, leaving him in a difficult position personally.

At around 20, Wynne travelled alone to the United States. He hitchhiked from New Jersey before buying a car and driving farther across the country, sleeping on petrol-station forecourts along the way. In one New Jersey town he was escorted out for vagrancy. In Arizona, he gained access to photograph inside Arizona State Penitentiary.

After returning to Britain in 1991, Wynne enrolled at Gwent College in Newport, where the documentary photography course was led by Daniel Meadows. He completed the course but left without collecting his certificate.

In 1992 and 1993, he worked as a labourer on building sites. He married and had four children, moving to Birkenhead in 1995 before later returning to Neston on the Wirral. He went on to establish a small fencing firm, which he continues to run alongside his photography.

A life in photography

Photography remained a constant presence in Wynne’s life, but it did not become his profession. Work and raising a family left limited time for printing, editing or pursuing exhibitions. Many of his negatives were processed but remained unprinted and unscanned for decades.

Wynne continued to photograph whenever he could. His Leica M2, the second camera given to him by his father, became a familiar companion. He has never regarded photography as a hobby, yet for much of his life it existed separately from his paid work.

“It means everything and it means nothing,” he has said. “It’s not my hobby and it’s not my profession. It’s always just been there.”

As his children became older and more independent, Wynne found time to return to the archive. Around 2017 and 2018, he began scanning negatives that had sat untouched for decades, bringing work that had received little public exposure back into view. Since 2020, his photographs have been part of the British Culture Archive collections.

Wynne also returned to the darkroom to produce 12 × 16-inch prints from his American negatives for an exhibition in Liverpool. Some of the photographs had never previously been seen as finished prints. Watching them appear in the developer returned him to the process that had first drawn him towards photography at school.

Wynne does not expect a single photograph to carry the full meaning of his work. He hopes that the accumulated archive will communicate something of his life and the encounters that have shaped it. Photography has encouraged him to enter unfamiliar situations, examine his beliefs and listen to experiences beyond his own.

He distinguishes between his everyday working identity and “Nick the photographer,” whom he describes as more inquisitive, positive and prepared to challenge perceived injustice. “I much prefer Nick the photographer,” he says. “He’s a braver person.”

His clearest account of what photography means to him is also the most personal: “I suppose it’s my conscience.”

Seen today, these early photographs belong to the photographic history of Liverpool, Merseyside and the wider North West at the end of the 1980s, and they are inseparable from Wynne’s own. Photography gave him a way to engage with the world, and he continued making pictures whether or not anyone was looking.

Nick Wynne’s photographic work is represented by British Culture Archive for print sales and image licensing. For print, publishing, exhibition and licensing enquiries, contact British Culture Archive.