Words by Ruth Toda-Nation
Ruth Toda-Nation was sixteen when she began photographing Merseyside while studying at Wallasey School of Art. Made across Birkenhead, Liverpool’s Pier Head and Liverpool 8 during 1983 and 1984, these early photographs grew out of her own questions about family, identity and where she considered home.
In the 1980s, my home of Merseyside was often portrayed as economically deprived. The Toxteth riots occurred in 1981, and Liverpool, along with the surrounding areas, suffered from high unemployment in the late ’70s and early ’80s. I was 16 years old, and this was my first attempt at photography, having never had the opportunity to hold a camera before. I wanted to show the warm-hearted, strong, and proud people I loved.
In my naive way, I shot as close to the people as I could, drawing the focus away from the deprived environment and allowing the people themselves to shine.
Photo © Ruth Toda-Nation, all rights reserved.
This was as much about finding my home, roots, and sense of place as it was about documenting this proud city and its people. In a way, I was viewing my home through the eyes of an outsider, having spent my formative years as part of a diverse community in Japan. My childhood experiences had sparked my curiosity about other people, and returning to Merseyside at secondary school age left me pondering where I was from and where I would call home.
I left school at 15 and enrolled at Wallasey School of Art. I had attended Wirral Grammar School for Girls. Getting into Grammar school was considered a great privilege, but little preparation was involved. You took the exam and either passed or failed, determining your future path. We were expected to pursue careers in law, teaching or medicine, but I didn’t fit that mould – I wanted to draw and paint.
The headmistress derided me when I announced that I was enrolling in art school, telling me that my life would come to nothing and I was burying my head in the sand like an ostrich.
Photo © Ruth Toda-Nation, all rights reserved.
Wallasey was part of a particularly active photographic environment on Merseyside during this period. Tom Wood, who had moved to the area in 1978, was photographing across Liverpool and the Wirral and would become one of the photographers associated with the wider reassessment of British documentary photography taking place through the 1980s. Several photographers later published or represented by BCA also passed through Wallasey, including Nick Wynne, who studied there later in the decade and was also taught by Wood.
Art school opened my mind, and as soon as I shot my first roll of film, I was hooked; I had found my visual language. I was influenced by some passionate and individual teachers at Wallasey School of Art and, in my final year, by Tom Wood, who encouraged me to take my portfolio down to some London universities. I saw glimpses of Tom’s work then, but I never really grasped the enormity of the historical overview of an era he was creating.
Photo © Ruth Toda-Nation, all rights reserved.
Tom Wood wasn’t from Merseyside, but he was there documenting ‘us’. I used to see him gliding past, shooting from the top deck of double-decker buses, and walking around the streets taking photos with two or three cameras hanging around his neck – one for colour and the other for black and white. I knew he documented at The Chelsea Reach nightclub, so I never went there again. I didn’t want to be one of his subjects; I wanted to be the one doing the documenting!
Photo © Ruth Toda-Nation, all rights reserved.
Toda-Nation’s photographs were nevertheless developing from a different position. Merseyside was connected to her own family history, while years spent between Britain and Japan meant that she could approach somewhere she regarded as home with a degree of distance. The work was therefore both documentary and personal from the outset.
I documented people on the streets of Birkenhead and later on the Liverpool side of the Mersey, at The Pier Head and Toxteth, Liverpool 8. I was interested in Toxteth because that was where my roots were. My great-grandparents had moved from Scotland when Liverpool was in its heyday, and I felt drawn to the area. We were told that the Toxteth riots were race riots, but that’s not what I saw, and that’s what I was questioning when I walked the streets of Toxteth.
To me, it seemed more about the youth expressing frustration against the establishment, against the police. We were afraid of the police, and back then, the police tactics were often brutal and racist. Distrust of the police was a significant causal factor in the uprising.
BCA has also published Leroy Cooper’s photographs of Toxteth in the 1980s, made from within Liverpool 8 during the same decade and offering a different photographic perspective on the area.
Photo © Ruth Toda-Nation, all rights reserved.
The disturbances in Liverpool 8 in July 1981 had a complex background. Contemporary investigations and subsequent historical accounts have examined severe unemployment, racial discrimination, housing conditions and longstanding tensions between sections of the community and Merseyside Police. Toda-Nation’s account above is her recollection of how she understood those events as a young photographer walking the area several years later; it sits within that wider history rather than replacing it.
Her photographs themselves concentrate less on political spectacle than on the people she encountered in the years after the uprising. That distinction is central to the work.
Like the beautiful but dilapidated buildings, the older men dressed smartly in ties, macs, flat caps, and trilbies, and the ladies in dresses and hats, out doing their shopping, seemed to be gifting us with a reflection of a bygone era. The juxtaposition between the newer, eclectic mix of cultures and ethnicities in Liverpool, and the older generation that held their proud history in their gaze, was what intrigued me. I wanted to acknowledge this diversity in my work.
I was mesmerised by and documented some of the grand old buildings, a powerful testament to the history of the place, but I was more fascinated by the people I met there. For me, Liverpool is, and always will be, about the people.
Photo © Ruth Toda-Nation, all rights reserved.
After graduating from the University of Westminster (Harrow) in 1989, I returned to Japan to live and work as a photographer. I came back to the UK in 2000 and I’m currently living in Milton Keynes where I continue to document the city and the people around me. My current project, ‘Our Lockdown Garden,’ will be published by The Mindful Editions.
Liverpool’s Black Community Trail — National Museums Liverpool
Context on Liverpool’s Black history, including unemployment, racism, police harassment and the 1981 disturbances in Liverpool 1 and Liverpool 8.
Toxteth 1981 — National Museums Liverpool
Historical interpretation of the uprising and its wider social and racial context.
Ruth Toda-Nation — Our Lockdown Garden, ILFORD Photo
Toda-Nation’s account of her later photographic project made during the Covid-19 lockdown.
Ruth Toda-Nation — Love is a Life Story, Royal Photographic Society
Later project documenting the friendship between Toda-Nation’s father John and his neighbour Mary.
Ruth Toda-Nation — My Father and Me, Royal Photographic Society
Toda-Nation on photographing her father, family history and the relationship between caregiving and photography.
