It’s a Sunday in 1971, and a shy 11-year-old kid is wandering around Hackney with his camera, looking for something to photograph. Spotting a Palestinian Liberation Organisation rally, he stops to take pictures and promptly takes his prints to a photo agency on Fleet Street. Incredibly, one of them ends up on the front cover of the Daily Mirror, pocketing the child snapper the princely sum of £16.
There are many remarkable stories like this surrounding Dennis Morris and his photographs at his three-floor exhibition Music + Life. Born in Jamaica, Morris moved to London before encountering photography through a camera club at his local church, St Mark’s in Dalston. There was, perhaps as a consequence, a religiosity about the way Morris devoted himself to the medium (he was dubbed “Mad Dennis” for preferring photography over football). Around the same time as he shot the PLO protest, Morris had also set up a humble commercial photo studio in the bedsit he shared with his mum – he pinned up a white sheet and borrowed a tungsten spotlight from St Mark’s. A few of these pictures from the early 1970s feature in the show, striking in their maturity and command of the camera. He understood how to make his subjects look and feel good.
