In 1985, Syd Shelton recalls, children on bikes still ruled the streets; there weren’t so many cars, and kids didn’t have phones to stare at. He took this picture in Dublin, near the docks. He was in the city preparing a photographic project called Ireland: A Week in the Life of a Nation. Fifty photographers, some famous, such as William Klein, were due to arrive to capture the country in pictures. In the meantime, Shelton had some time to wander. He thinks of this picture as a street portrait rather than something entirely spontaneous: “I was using flash and a tripod and the image was very much a conversation between me and the kids.”
The street with the gasometers was in Ringsend, on the south bank of the Liffey. At the time it was entirely a residential area – some of the houses were built by William Beckett, Samuel’s grandfather, in the 1880s. Many of them have now been demolished. Ringsend is the home of Google’s European HQ, and the gasometer has been redeveloped as luxury apartments. Shelton has another photograph from that afternoon in 1985. “I got the kids on bikes to gather their mates,” he says, “and I took a picture of 40 of them, with the gasometer behind.”
This picture is included in a group exhibition at the Atlas Gallery in London called Seen Not Heard, devoted to the idea of childhood, with a percentage of the sale price for each print sold donated to Save the Children. For Shelton, it represents something of a lost world, and not only because the streets themselves no longer exist. “The fact is,” he says, “you can’t take pictures of children any more. I was doing a story on London Road in Brighton a few years ago and took a picture of some children queueing for an ice-cream. Two minutes later, two police cars screeched to a halt at the kerb. Someone had called 999.”
