"I Still Believe We Can Change The World"
- Chris Hilton
- Jun 22, 2025
- 2 min read
Nick Hedges
"The families depicted were caught in a never ending cycle of poverty, insecurity, and frequently ill health. Their evident despair reflects the complete loss of hope in there being any positive resolution to their deprivation."
Most of us just take pictures but some photographers are driven by something deeper ... giving a voice to the voiceless, and chief amongst them was Nick Hedges who passed away last week. Not only a loss to the photography world but the world in general.
Back in the Sixties, he worked with the Charity 'Shelter' (around the same time as Ken Loach filmed Cathy Come Home) to expose the dire condition of Britains slums. The pictures reflected the lived realty in many of our inner cities. Outside of the charity's work there were tight restrictions on these images, they were used by Shelter to affect real change. That embargo remained in place for fifty years. It was only well after the slum clearances, when these images could be viewed in a historical context, that they became widely available through Bluecoat Press.
There are obvious parallels between Nick Hedges work and the work that Dorothea Lange carried out for the American Farm Security Administration during the Great Depression in the USA. In fact, Dorothea teamed up with the journalist John Steinbeck (deliciously dodgy music for the opening credits of this documentary) who paired evocative writing with her images ... the experience led him to write The Grapes of Wrath, but his original, journalistic descriptions and some of Dorothea's work can be found in the book The Harvest Gypsies.
Nick Hedges later used this technique when he teamed up with the writer Huy Beynon to uncover working conditions of factories in the West Midlands. Together they produced the book "Born To Work". In 2013 Huy produced a film about the project using the testominy's of some of the workers set to Nick's photographs.
Another photographer from the Bluecoat stable is Janine Wiedel, whose book, Vulcan's Forge is also about the heavy industry in the West Midlands during the 70's ... she will be talking about that and other projects when she joins us at the club this September.
