A baby checks her mail between the Toxteth riots: Mike Abrahams’ best photograph

I grew up near Penny Lane in Liverpool but I didn’t see many blue suburban skies. Just like any other northern industrial city, it was kind of desolate. Bomb sites everywhere. As I got older, it became harder to tell which bomb sites were from the war and which had been inflicted by Liverpool city planners.
I started taking photographs in my teens after failing to get into medical school. I worked for a while for the ambulance service, transporting elderly and disabled people to and from day centres. It took me all over the city, including condemned streets where people were still living in sad and deprived conditions in houses marked for demolition. Later, while studying photography at the Polytechnic of Central London in 1973, I went back to one of those streets with my camera.
At the time, I didn’t realise how good the pictures I took were, but my tutor Maggie Murray impressed on me that they contained an awful lot of information. Looking at them in later years, I realised they say a lot about people’s lives. You can draw things from them that go beyond the classic elements that make a good photograph, such as framing, lighting and so on.
This photograph was taken during a return trip to Liverpool in July 1981, the month of the Toxteth riots. It was after the first wave of the rioting and just before the second; it was also the week Charles and Diana were getting married, and I was keen to see what was going on in the area relating to that.
Racism had long been a problem in Toxteth. In 1919, attacks on Black-occupied homes had led to the murder of one resident, Charles Wotten, who was chased to the docks by a group of angry white men, thrown into the water and pelted with bricks and stones. Sixty-two years later, the riots were fuelled by a catastrophic economic crisis, a combative prime minister in Margaret Thatcher, and an institutionally racist police force. It was the arrest of a young Black man, Leroy Cooper, that finally lit the fuse.
The night things really kicked off, there were incredible scenes, with someone driving a digger at the police, and people ripping up lamp posts and scaffolding poles and using them like medieval jousting lances. But I don’t consider myself a very good photographer of riots, and besides, what I’ve always thought more interesting is not the fact that people throw stones, but why they’re thrown. That’s why I chose to photograph in Granby Street, which I knew well. Along with the surrounding streets, it was part of Liverpool 8, one of the country’s earliest multicultural neighbourhoods.
Here, a baby in a bonnet sits in a pram looking through papers. Could she be examining an eviction notice or a gas bill? A letter from an absent friend? Who and where is her mother? In the shop to the right maybe. Perhaps she is with one of the men on the right. Is this an image of neglect or of a tight and safe community where everyone has eyes on their neighbour’s children? What is the story and history of that pram from another era?
The baby has a look about her that suggests a much older soul. She’ll be in her 40s now – perhaps one day she’ll come forward with all the answers. It was just one of those things: you see something extraordinary, you take a picture, you walk on. I did once hear from the daughter-in-law of the guy on the left, after someone posted the picture on a Liverpool Facebook page – sadly he’d since passed away.
In the end, the conclusion I come to is that it’s a picture of a good, solid community where everybody’s on each other’s side in the simplest way possible. It is a street picture that is full of ambiguous information and a heap of questions, taken in the centre of a neighbourhood that rose up against an oppressive state.
This Was Then, collecting Mike Abrahams’ photographs from 1971-2001, is published by BlueCoat Press.
Born: 1952, JohannesburgTrained: BA Photographic Arts, Polytechnic Central LondonInfluences: “Cartier-Bresson, Marc Riboud, Leonard Freed, Danny Lyon, Larry Burrows, W Eugene Smith, Philip Jones Griffiths, Don McCullin”High point: “The chance to meet people and go to places I might not otherwise have had the opportunity to, and to earn a living as a photographer for 45 years”Low point: “The global decimation of the independent photo agencies with the arrival of the internet, and the loss of the community that bound photographers, agents and newspapers and magazines together”Top tip: “Focus on what interests you and look around the corner”