When the British-Burmese photographer Chris Steele-Perkins died earlier this week, one of the many to pay tribute to him was the American nonfiction writer Patrick Radden Keefe. In particular, it was the images Steele-Perkins took in West Belfast during the Troubles that Radden Keefe was drawn to.
These images, taken from a tour of Northern Ireland in 1979, included a selection from the Divis Flats. The notorious Republican stronghold was the last place Jean McConville was seen alive before she was executed by the IRA for being an alleged informant.
Chris Steele-Perkins at a Magnum meeting in London, 1994. Photograph: Peter Marlow/Magnum Photos
That murder and its fallout is at the centre of Radden Keefe’s award-winning book Say Nothing, and after the death of Steele-Perkins he wrote that the photographer’s shots of the flats where the story began had been a “huge source of inspiration”.
You can see why. Cars are burned out, kids play on a makeshift rope swing, poverty is evident, but often his subjects have smiles on their faces that add a disarming layer to the story that seems to undermine the official narrative. For a writer, trying to bring the past to life, Steele-Perkins’ images were like gold dust.
I had a similar reaction to Steele-Perkins’ work when I was writing We Were There, my cultural history of Black Britain in the Thatcher era. The photographer, who was born in Burma before moving to the north-east of England as a toddler, spent time with Black communities in Wolverhampton, where he was sent for a Sunday Times story, alongside writer Gordon Burn, to cover the town whose MP Enoch Powell had delivered the notorious Rivers of Blood speech a decade earlier.
Like the Divis Flats images, that series draws back the curtain on a community often presented as being synonymous with criminality and violence. “It wasn’t the easiest story,” he told the Guardian. “These were slightly pissed-off youth, and they weren’t dying to hang around with me.” But he persevered, capturing raucous church services, football games and sound system crews. When I was discussing cover designs and artwork for my book, one Chris Steele-Perkins image from Wolverhampton kept coming up in conversation.
Poetry in motion … Wolverhampton Disco, 1978. Photograph: Chris Steele-Perkins/Magnum
It’s an image taken from a dancehall in 1978. In it Steele-Perkins captures poetry in motion, as three women move to the music and a huge soundsystem frames them in the background. Steele-Perkins chose it as his favourite shot and it’s one that resonates with many people, capturing just what it’s like to be in a dance.
I looked at that photograph dozens of times when writing a chapter about Wolverhampton and the emergence of the Blk Art Group in the city during the early 1980s. One of the original members of the group, Claudette Johnson, later used it as the basis for a painting called Blues Dance in her solo show at the Courtauld in 2023.
Steele-Perkins was always drawn to the hidden aspects of a community; to what went on behind the headlines. Speaking about his series in West Belfast, he once said: “I was interested in how life was lived in its various facets, not just the rioting and the military occupation, though I couldn’t ignore that which was so prevalent, but also the leisure, the entertainment, the homes, the fun, the funerals and the community. I was not there to illustrate a thesis but to enter the unknown, interacting and responding, and attempting to remain honest.”
He took that approach with scenes that sat beyond the mainstream. He spent three years with teddy boys, the groups of young men who emerged in the 1960s with a rockabilly aesthetic and a reputation for violence – especially after their involvement in the Notting Hill race riots of 1958. Despite that reputation, Steele Perkins went into their homes, earned their trust and produced The Teds, an intimate, peerless portrait of the hugely influential subculture.
Steele-Perkins’ work has been understandably filed alongside that of Don McCullin, who was also able to find humanity amid deprivation and conflict. But he was also part of a wider group of artists, public intellectuals and writers who were – though not officially connected – actively producing a counter-narrative to mainstream media in the chaotic 1970s and early 1980s.
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Fellow travellers included the radical early era of Time Out, the films of Maureen Blackwood, Philip Donnellan and Tony Garnett, the writing of Stuart Hall and Spare Rib, the photography of Clement Cooper and the dub poetry of Linton Kwesi Johnson – all of whom projected an alternative perspective as Thatcherism took hold.
He documented the UK’s lurch rightward … Margaret Thatcher at the Conservative Party Conference, 1985. Photograph: Chris Steele-Perkins/Magnum
Steele-Perkins stands out among that group because of the way he was embraced by the mainstream. He joined the ranks of Magnum, the prestigious – and historically white – agency in 1979 (becoming a member in 1983 and going on to serve as president from 1995 to 1998). He also produced a well-received book The Pleasure Principle, that surveyed the country’s lurch rightward toward individualism and consumerism during the Thatcher era.
He also went far beyond the shores of Britain. Steele-Perkins travelled and photographed Afghanistan and Zimbabwe before settling with his second wife, Miyako Yamada, in Japan, where he continued to work, producing the books Fuji and Echoes.
Yamada announced the news of his death on Instagram. “His life as a photographer has been exciting, rewarding and enriching,” she wrote. “Thank you very much.” We should all be thankful for the enrichment he brought to worlds that otherwise would have remained unseen.
