IN the early 1980s Victor Wedderburn bought his first camera and set about photographing his friends and neighbours in Manningham.
At the time the area was home to a large Caribbean migrant population. Nicknamed the ‘Frontline’ because of racial hostility faced by residents, it developed a negative reputation.
But self-taught photographer Wedderburn’s images reveal a different side to this community. His photographs offer an intimate portrait of a community shaped by resilience, friendship, enterprise, creativity and style.
Roy Lewinson with his Sunbeam Alpine Mk5 at Cunliffe Villas, Manningham.
Frontline 1984/85 Bradford - Victor Wedderburn’s debut photography book - brings together a rare and remarkable archive of colour photographs documenting Black life, style and community in Bradford during the 1980s.
Shot in vivid colour, at a time when the dominant representation of northern cities was black and white industrial grit, Frontline 1984/85 Bradford gives an insider’s view of a community rarely represented in mainstream media.
The images burst with energy, vibrancy and life, showing fashion and street-style, vanished landmarks and everyday community life at record shops, hairdressers, pubs and cafes.
Melanie Wedderburn and Janet Lewinson in their Shades Beauty Parlour, Lumb Lane.
Wedderburn took more than 1,500 film photographs during that time, but it was decades later that his images were discovered, when he’d long given up photography and was by then a retired mental health nurse.
Last year his photographs were exhibited at the Loading Bay gallery, as part of Bradford’s year as UK City of Culture, and at the National Science and Media Museum.
The Frontline book expands on those exhibitions, bringing together photographs from Wedderburn’s archive, including some that have not previously been exhibited.
Darrell Gregoire, Manny and friend in the Perseverance Hotel.
Together, they form an important visual record of a community and a period in Bradford’s history, while offering a distinctive contribution to the history of British social documentary photography.
Wedderburn was born in 1954 in the Parish of Manchester, Jamaica. When he was a small boy his father moved to England in the hope of setting up a new life for the family, followed shortly after by his mother.
Wedderburn remained in Jamaica until he was 16 when he joined his parents in Bradford. After graduating from Wyke Manor School at 18, he worked as a lorry driver for 10 years before being made redundant.
He used his modest redundancy pay to pursue a long-held ambition: photography. He bought a second-hand Single Lens Reflex (SLR) camera and a colour photography kit to develop photos himself.
He retired as an NHS mental health nurse in 2021.
Says Victor: “I bought my first camera in the early 80 with redundancy money from losing my truck-driving job, and then I just started taking photographs.
“The ‘Frontline’ had grown from the people who lived in the flats on Lumb Lane when, in the summer, there used to be a congregation of African-Caribbean people outside the Perseverance Hotel or the Young Lions Café - there was always music on and people who knew me.
“I didn’t know anyone who developed photographs, so I just learnt myself developing by putting everything in bin liners and doing it by touch and by feel. My friends laughed at me for taking colour pictures, because they weren’t considered art.”
Mycall Isrell in the Perseverance Hotel car park.
Anne McNeill, editor of Frontline 1984/85 Bradford, says: “Victor’s images tell the story of the Frontline as place where generations hang out at cafes, hire films from the local video shop, where romances blossom, where endless football games are won and lost, where men shoot the breeze over a game of pinball, and where cars, a source of pride for their owners, are characters in their own right. All to the beat of sound systems playing reggae, roots, and dub.
“Frontline is an irreplaceable visual record of a period in British history, and a distinctive contribution to British social documentary photography that is full of relevance for today’s audiences.”
Mark Sealy, Director of Autograph ABP says Wedderburn’s photographs “are an invaluable time capsule that captures an unseen side of Black Britain, that are hard, yet soft and disarming”.
“They tell a story of the community that Wedderburn knew from the inside out. This timely and powerful book of photographs add yet another important missing chapter to the history of Black Britain.”
l Frontline 1984/85 Bradford is published on November 5 by Trolley Books, distributed by Thames & Hudson and produced by Bradford Culture Company with funding from The National Lottery Heritage Fund. The book includes essays from writer and curator of Professor of Dress, Diaspora and Transnationalism Carol Tulloch and Bradford journalist Lanre Bakare, and is edited by Anne McNeill, a prominent figure in British photography.
The book can be pre-ordered at www.trolleybooks.com/collections/frontpage/products/frontline-bradford