For a couple of years in the late 2000s, the photographer John Goto, who has died aged 74 of hypersensitivity pneumonitis, and his wife Celia, a psychoanalyst, posed for a series of images he titled West End Blues. Singly or together, they stood in profile in front of restaurants and theatres around Soho, London, in costumes dating from the end of the first world war to the end of the Vietnam conflict. Their figures were then Photoshopped out of the resulting photographs, leaving negative images like the ones silhouetted on walls by a nuclear blast.
Each photograph was named after a famous jazz musician – Louis Armstrong, Ken “Snakehips” Johnson, Adelaide Hall – who had come to play in London between 1919 and 1974. Most were black, many of them migrants. The 17 images in West End Blues were variously troublesome. In terms of genre, they seemed closest to street photography, and yet their subjects were posed rather than happened upon. The bleached-out Gotos were flat, the backgrounds behind them three-dimensional; the photographs affected to be archival, and yet were entirely contemporary. Worst of all, the images had been openly, joyously manipulated on a computer. When Goto turned his series into an augmented reality walking tour downloadable on a mobile phone, critics of a purist bent shuddered.
This discomfort was intentional. As Goto recalled, his fondness for Armstrong et al had begun on youthful visits to Soho to listen to jazz. Just as the musicians in West End Blues had seen London as an escape from life back home, so Goto saw his trips to hear them as a release from the English provinces.
Born in Stockport, near Manchester, to Bernard Glithero, an engineer, and Catherine (nee Craig), a housewife, he had moved with his family to Berkshire as a child. After attending grammar school in Windsor (which he disliked), he went to the Berkshire College of Art in Maidenhead in 1965 and then to study painting at St Martin’s School of Art in London. It was there that he discovered the cinema as another, and more permanent, means of escape. Impressed by Walerian Borowczyk’s film Goto, l’île d’amour (1969), John Glithero took the island of its title as his name.
The hybrid nature of the images in West End Blues suggested another form of permanence. Their apparently random settings had actually been archaeologically sought out. The Chinese restaurant in the photograph called Sidney Bechet stood on the site of the Royal Philharmonic Hall where Bechet had played in 1919; the block of flats in Shake Keane and Ambrose Campbell had once been home to the Abalabi Club. “My West End is inhabited by the spectre of musicians past and sounds lost,” Goto said. “But are they really lost? I’m convinced that on a quiet night, towards dawn, the attentive listener can still hear the strains of Rent House Stomp or Yolanda.”
This taste for muddying the typological waters had come early. In 1981, Goto had his first one-man show, a retrospective at the Photographers’ Gallery of 60 photographs taken over the previous decade. This, unusually, was advertised by a movie poster made by the graphic artist and sometime film-maker Andrzej Klimowski, a St Martin’s friend. The exhibition also had its own soundtrack, of voices speaking in Czech and Polish.
In 1978, Goto had spent several months on a scholarship in Prague, a place he described as “poised between past and present”. The experience left him with a profound sense of himself as a European photographer, and resentment at the postwar dominance in Europe of American photography. Echoes of Russian constructivism and the Bauhaus would recur in his art for the rest of his career.
In the year before Prague, he had taught photography evening classes at the Lewisham youth centre in south London. As he had with jazz musicians, so he felt a kinship with his predominantly black students. The previous year had seen riots at the Notting Hill carnival; in August, a National Front march had sparked the so-called Battle of Lewisham. “Young black people were being actively criminalised,” Goto recalled, and yet there was “no space for accounts of their cultural life”. This he provided in the form of portraits of his students, taken in a dance hall next to the youth centre.
Typically, there was no interest in these at the time. It was only in 2013 that the series was finally shown, in an exhibition at Art Jericho in Oxford called 1977: Lewisham & Belleville. (The Belleville images were taken when Goto spent part of that year in Paris on a British Council scholarship.) To coincide with the show, the Lewisham photographs were published as a book called Lovers’ Rock, which also included a series of essays, one of them by Lady Young of Hornsey, who noted that the portraits were something more than just a corrective “to pictures of black youth rioting”. Goto admitted to “a resonance” with his subjects, “the recognition of a struggle I knew and carried within me”.
“It may only be a bleak hope,” he went on, “but in this struggle, I believe, lies our dignity.”
In 1980, Goto moved to Oxford, where he would live for the rest of his life, teaching at Oxford Polytechnic (which became Oxford Brookes University) for 20 years. At lunchtimes, students would be shown the work of his favourite film-makers, including Kurosawa and Tarkovsky. In 2003, he was made professor of fine art at the University of Derby, and then emeritus professor from 2013 until his death.
The terrace house he shared with Celia he liked to describe as “the smallest palace in the world”, its walls hung with the work of St Martin’s friends, such as Klimowski and Craigie Horsfield, jazz inevitably playing in the background. He regularly passed the plaster dog outside a jeweller’s shop on the High Street that the Bauhaus artist László Moholy-Nagy, fleeing nazism, had photographed in 1936. The dog, and other Moholy photographs, inspired Goto’s own show, Two Days at Oxford, in 2016.
In 1967, while at St Martin’s, Goto had met Linda Gowan; they married in 1972 and divorced in 1982. He met Celia Farrelly the following year, and married her in 1992. She survives him, as do the daughters, Jade and Zoey, of his first marriage.
• John (Glithero) Goto, photographer, born 11 February 1949; died 2 August 2023
• This article was amended on 19 August 2023. John Goto was born in Stockport, not Stockton as an earlier version said.
