EDINBURGH, Scotland — A White boy lifts a match to a cigarette. A Black girl floats on a scratched seesaw. A rock band strums from a pickup truck parked between towering housing projects, posters pasted to the door reading, “End Unemployment. GET THEM OUT!”
Sandra George’s intimate portraits of urban Scottish life during the 1980s and ’90s reveal a world of both resilience and enduring solidarity. In one photograph, a student is arrested at an anti-nationalist protest; in another, a bouquet is thrust into the air at a rally upon Nelson Mandela’s release from prison. Brown, Black, and White women gather at a community center to discuss their shared grievances; “Every Mother is a Working Mother,” a placard declares in cursive calligraphy.
A Black British photographer whose own minoritization abetted her empathy for outsiders, George never received mainstream acclaim for her prolific body of work. Sandra George: Start from the Level, a new show at the City Art Centre of Edinburgh, makes a convincing, if overdue, case to change that. The largest exhibition of George’s work to date, Start from the Level reveals the activist-artist as a sensitive witness to private and public life in the throes and aftermath of Thatcher-era privatization in the United Kingdom. Though the subjects of George’s social documentary photography come from a range of racial backgrounds, many dwell or work in neglected housing projects. “Rich Scum fuck off” is graffitied on the door of a unit in Edinburgh’s Craigmillar public housing complex from 1994. In Leith, across town, a pile of timber and abandoned mattresses becomes a makeshift playground, from which four boys beam down as though they’ve scaled a mountain.
While never polemical, George’s work is inherently political in how it frames its subjects, suggesting shared interests rooted in common humanity amid rising economic inequality. Whether depicting children drawing in the sand at Portobello Beach or the elderly receptionist at BlindCraft bed factory (staffed by the visually impaired), George’s images balance a rawness and dignity rare in photography of working-class individuals. As a freelance photojournalist and community worker, George spent most of her time within the spaces of the urban poor, and approached those behind her lens as equals. Her images serve as the defiant flipside to so-called poverty porn — a moving reminder of the agency and depth inherent to all people pushed to the margins.
In her extensive documentation of her own life, George’s tender portraits of her son Tyler — from a premature baby in an incubator to a boisterous toddler, child, and adolescent — suggest a humble, art-filled home where creative play flourishes. By contrast, George’s cogent self-portraits present a pensive single mother — one with serious swagger and a steady, unflinching mien.
As I navigated the galleries on a drizzly summer afternoon, the eclectic and expressive faces on display seemed to illuminate the walls, united in a common struggle. “Stop making assumptions about people,” George scribbled in an exhibited notebook, which serves as a kind of artist manifesto. “Start from the level that people are based.”
Given that economic injustice — in Britain, but especially the United States — has only intensified since George’s untimely death in 2013, may her legacy lead us to do just that.
Sandra George: Start from the Level continues at the City Art Centre (2 Market Street, Edinburgh, Scotland) through September 27. The exhibition was produced in partnership with Craigmillar Now.
