Shirley Baker and the links to A Taste of Honey

Through thinking about the setting of A Taste of Honey, I remembered Shirley Baker's photography of the Salford slums in the mid 1960's.

Shirley Baker (1932 - 2014) was a social documentary photographer working from 1961 - 1981 in the working-class inner city areas of Manchester and Blackpool. She was born in Kersal in North Salford where her family had a furniture manufacturing business. She went on to study photography at Manchester college of Technology and was one of the first women to receive formal photographic training in post-war Britain. 
Baker had a passion for social injustice 'My sympathies lay with the people who were forced to exist miserably, often for months on end, sometimes years, whilst demolition went on all around them.' 

Baker's compassion for the people living in poverty is clear throughout the photos and provides a realistic view on the state of conditions the slums were like. 
My favourite of the photos I have chosen is the one on the bottom left of the coloured photos, where people are queuing for rehousing enquiries. 

Throughout A Taste of Honey Jo and her mother Helen are constantly moving to unfit housing while her mother makes money as a prostitute. The work of Shirley reflects well the poverty they also have to live in and are surrounded by, in the opening scene of the play we see Helen and Jo move into another unfit room where Jo is particularly bothered around the bare lightbulb and puts her headscarf around it, the yearning for a cosy home and security is a theme apparent within both Baker's and Delaney's work and I want to make sure that is reflected in my work.