LIVERPOOL: LOOKING OUT TO SEA

Liverpool, 1980’s

On assignment in Liverpool in the early 1980s, photojournalist Peter Marlow bore witness to the enormity of the devastation afflicting inner cities. He knew that what he had seen could not be covered in a single magazine story and so he returned to the city many times over subsequent years.

Liverpool, with its long maritime history, was a city built at the hub of the Empire. Amid the new housing, the shopping precincts, the demolition sites and the wasteland; among the glue-sniffers, football crowds, elderly and young, black and white, he found a vitality and an instinct for survival. But he saw the city in decline, isolated like an island surrounded by the dreams of a Thatcherite nation. Liverpool: Looking Out to Sea forms one of the fiercest social documents of an inner city in Britain, and becomes one of the strongest indictments of an era.

BOOK PUBLISHED: 18 March 1993, Jonathan Cape Ltd

INITIAL INTEREST: 1982 on assignment for ‘The Sunday Times’ to Liverpool

PHOTOGRAPHS TAKEN: 1982, 1985, 1986, 1988, 1989, 1990, 1991

[SPENT ONE WEEK OF EVERY MONTH IN LIVERPOOL - Opportunity for Peter to take a look at his own country.]

BLACK & WHITE: 1982, 1985, 1986, 1988, 1989, 1990

TOPICS: the everyday: public spaces, community, family, work, cultural spaces, seaside, demolition, nostalgia, football, tip

BOOK DUMMY: 1991

1st EXHIBITION: 1993 - Photographers Gallery

PRESS: ‘Late Again’, BBC Show June 1994, took Peter back to Liverpool to discuss his book [Clip available]

ARCHIVE: Book Dummy, tearsheets, contact sheets, press publications, diaries, exhibition preparation, posters etc