Against Xenophobia and Islamophobia (The Lost Portraits of Bradford)

Thanks to my wonderful British “cousin” AC for bringing my attention to this lovely, sweet, humane and profoundly democratic 2019 BBC TV documentary about a now-defunct photo portrait studio in Bradford and its incredible archive of the city’s changing human face. It’s welcome tonic to my soul as the leading liberal lights in my adopted former “homeland” of Russia indulge in yet another orgy of Islamophobia over horrible crimes committed in completely different countries.

I wish they would watch this documentary and take its message to heart. It might surprise them to learn that not all “westerners” are rabid racists, xenophobes, and Islamophobes. People can learn to live together, learn “conviviality” and unlearn “post-imperial melancholia,” as the great Paul Gilroy (a world-famous contemporary scholar whose works are totally absent in Russian translation, unsurprisingly) has called them. |||| TRR

Thirty years ago, thousands of portraits from a small studio in Bradford were saved from a skip. They form a unique collection of photographs that records the changing face of a British industrial city in the middle of the 20th century. Many of the people in the portraits were new arrivals from the Asian subcontinent, eastern Europe and the Caribbean, attracted by the offer of work in wool mills. The names of these people are a mystery – only their faces survive.

A small studio, Belle Vue, in the middle of Bradford, built a business on taking portraits of the newly-arrived migrants. Photographer Tony Walker used a battered Victorian camera to take images of his customers, which were often sent back to relatives in the countries they’d left behind.

Working alongside staff from museums in Bradford, presenter Shanaz Gulzar identifies and tracks down the people in the portraits, and uncovers dramatic social change and the hidden stories behind the portraits.