The Alternative Picture Gallery

A meeting with London photographer Steve Moore introduced me to some wonderful graffiti in the Brick Lane area of London.  Steve has been photographing these walls for many months and has a great collection of photographs of these walls on which the graffiti changes almost daily.  He has kindly allowed me to use some of his photography.  I wish I could show you more but I can urge visitors to the capital to make their way there and see for themselves.

These are very contrasting images, deliberately placed by me side by side, because this represents the place from which they come, an eclectic collection of images of quiet, contemplative portraits and violent, manga-style fantasy.

Out of the many photographs of graffiti in this area that Steve has taken over the past few months, it is difficult to choose those that exemplify the artistic urge behind the artists' work.  Here are just a few more to whet the appetite.

Not all are social comment or pictorial representations, a lot of the graffiti on view on these walls are Manga-style pictures, testifying perhaps to the interest in the illustrated comic-books and graphic novels of today.

It may not be wise to leave your van alone when you visit.  If it is standing still long enough, someone will paint something on it!

And then there are others, weird, abstract pictures that leave people wondering, sometimes moved by the experience.  The preponderance of such art in this area does make one question what is being presented to us in the major galleries as the height of man's artistic prowess.  I'm not saying that the great pictures housed in our national and private galleries are inferior, far from it, but I do query the experts who price so called 'modern' art in stratospheric figures when down here, in the East End of London, dozens of young men and women, many of them art school graduates looking for a client, are connecting with a different public.  I've seen this public, standing silently before these images, the sort of people who would never dream of crossing the steps of the National Gallery or the Tate Gallery, the sort of people who think those places "aren't for me".

No. 1 favourite is the one below of the Battle of Cable Street, a dark moment in England's social history when the home-grown fascists of the Mosley Brigade fought with the local people.  The battle took place on Sunday 4th October 1936 in Cable Street, a bloody clash between the police who were protecting the members of a march by members of the BUF, the British Union of Fascists led by Oswald Mosley.  The defenders of the patch were local Jewish, socialist, anarchist and communist groups.  Mosley's followers were dressed in uniforms styled on those of Hitler's Blackshirts and the East End at that time had a large Jewish population.

The Battle of Cable Street was a major factor in the passing the Public Order Act which required police consent for political marches and forbade the wearing of political uniforms in public, an Act widely considered to be a significant factor in the BUF's political decline prior to the Second World War.