Collections Online

Written on the back of this work is: “I made a small project in the late 1970s on community festivals in London. At the time I was involved with a group called Exit working on a large project about inner city poverty, and photographing street festivals was a sort of antidote: lighten up, have fun and be weird. I had no great ambitions for the photos; they were a part of an ongoing exploration of England and some of them were published in a small but influential photographic magazine Creative Camera, as well as some other general interest magazines. Time moves on, and earlier this year someone selected this image from a rather random collection of prints, many of which had never been digitized, in the Magnum London archive. This was for an exhibition in Brighton. It surprised me, then I looked at the photo again and thought that it's really not too bad, in fact it's pretty interesting and a touch strange, so that's why it is here, forty years after I took it.” — Chris Steele-Perkins