Liz Hingley captures one road but many worlds

Dec 10 2010 By Terry Grimley

Terry Grimley speaks to photographer Liz Hingley about her exhibition capturing the many lives in one city community.

Perhaps it’s time that Birmingham’s Soho Road, which has been in the front line of multicultural Britain since the 1960s, was recognised as a national treasure.

Thirty-one years ago photographers Derek Bishton, John Reardon and Brian Homer set up a photo-booth there and invited local residents to record themselves, relinquishing control of the shutter and blanking out the sterotypical inner-city background with a white cloth. The resulting black-and-white images of Handsworth Self-Portrait remain inspirational to this day.

Photographer Liz Hingley wasn’t even born when those pictures were being taken, but her background has given her a unique perspective on the city’s diversity.

The daughter of two Anglican vicars, she was born in Birmingham and raised initially in Balsall Heath, where she was the only white girl in her nursery.

“My dad had a largely Afro Caribbean congregation, and I grew up on rice and peas,” she recalls.

“The next door neighbours were Yemeni and they would come round with chapati after chapati and painted my mother’s hands with henna every Eid.

“Then we moved to Lee Bank just before it had all the redevelopment done. We were just on the border of Edgbaston and Lee Bank, between big white houses and big grey tower blocks.

“Then we moved to Moseley and now my parents are in Great Barr.”

Liz, now 25, is taking a part-time MA in social anthropology at University College London. Having trained in photography at Brighton University, she has embarked on a career which has already taken in several awards and an international dimension, with projects in France and Italy.

But her latest project, Under Gods, stories from Soho Road, has brought her back to Birmingham to record the remarkable range of religious practices and identities to be found on Handsworth’s most celebrated street.

The exhibition is at Wolverhampton Art Gallery until the end of February, will be seen in London in March and is due to be published in book form in the spring.

It is often not recognised that Birmingham’s cultural diversity is an interesting subject for many Europeans, so it may be significant that Under Gods has been funded by an Italian foundation, Fabrica, and featured by leading French newspaper Le Monde (“Soho road, le culte de la difference par Liz Hingley”).

“l’ve lived in Italy and Brighton and realised how unique my upbringing in Birmingham was,” says Liz.

“It was something I wanted to celebrate. When I was in Italy there was a photographer friend who was taking pictures of mosques which would spring up in car parks and then be shut down. On Soho Road it seems there’s almost a pressure to celebrate your religion because everyone else is.

“I’m interested in people who live very close to each other and often in very different worlds.”

Her first experiment in recording a particular street consisted of photographing people with their Christmas trees on the road in Moseley where she was then living.

As it happened to be the road where I live, the Grimley Christmas tree was among those recorded for posterity.

Liz admits to not having been familiar with north Birmingham, but once she started talking to people about her idea for Under Gods she was quickly pointed in the direction of Soho Road.

At the same time, she was being advised against tackling the subject at all. One writer on photography she approached about an essay for the book said, in effect, that he did not do religion.

“I was warned off it by everybody. People said publishers find it difficult, they won’t take it.”