John Claridge obituary | Photography

At a funfair on Wanstead Flats, east London, within the mid-Fifties, a plastic digital camera was up for grabs. Eight-year-old John Claridge noticed it and wanted it. He wished to protect the reminiscences of all the pieces that whirled round him and take them again residence to the terrace home in Plaistow during which he had been born. He threw rings to win it however missed. He left empty-handed, however his course was set.

That path would result in a decades-long, multi-award-winning profession as an promoting photographer. He labored for the vacationer boards of the Bahamas, India, England and the US. He shot campaigns for Rolls-Royce, Porsche, Jack Daniels, Sony and Wrangler, and his work was honoured on the D&AD awards and the One Show awards in New York City.

Claridge, who has died aged 81, authored some 50 books, principally self-published, and his work has been exhibited extensively. His images are held in collections worldwide, together with the V&A, the National Portrait Gallery, the Arts Council of Great Britain and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

But, regardless of his success on this glamorous world, it’s his heat, intimate portrayal of his personal London neighbourhood, shot in black and white all through the 60s and 70s, and gathered within the 2016 monograph East End, for which he’s revered.

As a teen, Claridge, earlier than his early-morning paper spherical, would have breakfast together with his father. Len Claridge talked of his time at sea, of promoting liquor in New York throughout prohibition, of the bare-knuckle bouts he fought, and of life on the docks. Claridge additionally listened to his mom, Doll (nee Cashman), a shirt machinist, swapping tales together with her workmates and neighbours. Claridge described these tales as his “education in wonderment”, and to seize the surprise on his doorstep, he saved up and purchased an Ilford Sportsman digital camera on hire-purchase.

Claridge gravitated to the Thames and the docks the place his father labored, photographing from the shore or typically from a tiny inflatable dinghy he took out on to the river at daybreak. He taught himself easy methods to develop and print within the household’s exterior bathroom. The ensuing black-and-white photographs, imbued with the fog-shrouded mild emanating from the nice river, echo the work of JMW Turner, who Claridge later cited as an affect alongside photographers similar to Robert Frank, Walker Evans, Man Ray, Robert Doisneau and Brassaï.

When, at 15 years outdated, he left South West Ham technical faculty in Canning Town, he went to the native labour trade and informed them he wished to be a photographer. He was despatched, extra in hope than expectation, to the McCann Erickson promoting company within the West End, the place there was a gap for an assistant within the photographic division. Wearing a four-button herringbone go well with and winklepickers, all “bought on tick”, and together with his Thames photographs tucked underneath his arm, he received the job.

It was then that he turned his lens on to his personal neighborhood. Claridge told Spitalfields Life in 2012: “I used to go out with my camera at the weekends, or any spare time I had, to take pictures. I went out to see what was going on. I reacted to what was there and, if I saw something, I photographed it. It was instinctive. I never thought I was documenting. I had a need to take pictures; it was as natural as breathing.” For him, “photography was a natural language … This was my life.”

As a bombsite child he was fearless however respectful. He knew the individuals he photographed, and so they knew him. “Most of the time I ask,” he mentioned, “but at other times you just see something and grab it. I talk to them and it is through talking that you can open a door.” His candid, atmospheric work captured the thrill and travails of each day life within the East End and the portraits he made there – of shopkeepers, staff, urchins and the widely down-at-heel – are suffused with empathy.

These photographs opened doorways for Claridge. At McCann’s, he fell into the orbit of the famend graphic designer Robert Brownjohn, finest identified for his title sequences for the Bond movies From Russia With Love and Goldfinger. Brownjohn not solely inspired Claridge to see issues in a different way and to understand the summary, however he additionally organized for the 17-year-old to have his first solo exhibition on the company’s gallery, displaying his East End photos.

That identical yr, 1961, Claridge turned up unannounced on the doorstep of Bill Brandt’s residence in Hampstead, wanting to present certainly one of his heroes a print from the collection. Brandt, ever the gentleman, invited Claridge in and talked warmly about his work.

Confidence boosted, Claridge left McCann’s to work as an assistant to the American portrait and vogue photographer David Montgomery. In the 2 years he stayed with Montgomery, Claridge honed his personal printing fashion and frolicked together with his contemporaries Brian Duffy and David Bailey. At the age of 19, he branched out on his personal. He opened his personal studio close to St Paul’s Cathedral and commenced to work for Management Today, Harper’s Bazaar, Queen and Nova, and shortly the promoting work flowed.

His success led to a home on the Essex coast and an E-type Jaguar (though his lifelong ardour was for bikes), however after his marriage to Pauline Gallagher led to divorce, Claridge returned to London. There he lived in a flat on Frith Street in Soho that was his residence, studio, workplace and darkroom from 1976 to 1989. It was situated above Ronnie Scott’s jazz membership and, being a jazz buff, Claridge was in his component. He socialised with, and photographed, his fellow Eastender Scott and the musicians that performed on the membership, similar to Chet Baker, whose 1986 portrait, Claridge informed the Guardian, was his favorite {photograph}.

He was one thing of a bon viveur and had all the time frequented the French House on Dean Street. For 15 years from 2004, Claridge shot round 800 portraits of those who lived, labored and partied in Soho, in a makeshift studio within the landlady’s lounge above the pub. “The French” staged many exhibitions of his work together with, in 2009, Faces of Soho, his intimate portraits of its well-known clientele together with Alison Steadman, Sebastian Horsley and Lisa Stansfield.

In his later years, Claridge divided his time between London and his residence in south-east France – a farmhouse he and his second spouse, Janet (previously Leeves, nee Caldwell), whom he married in 1985, had renovated from a shell. Janet survives him.