Ken Russell’s postwar London

By Tim Martin

In 1945, aged 18, Ken Russell put an advertisement in the London newspapers. “Young aesthete suffering from ennui forced to seek work,” it read. “Almost any opportunity considered.” Before he became a filmmaker best known for directing The Who’s rock opera “Tommy” and “The Devils”, Russell had an odd assortment of careers. He was briefly in the merchant navy, then in the air force, then became a ballet dancer in Norway, then an actor with the Garrick Players. After that he bought a camera and took to the streets of London as a freelance photographer, shooting all day and developing films on the table of his bedsit at night.

Russell’s photos from the 1950s, which he sold through an agency to magazines such as Picture Post and Illustrated, go on show this month at the Proud Gallery in Chelsea. “I wanted to be a fashion photographer but it was too early for my kind of style,” Russell later said. Instead he prowled the city, seeking out curious and eccentric images: a septuagenarian failed novelist, children play-acting on bombsites, the coolly androgynous members of the short-lived Teddy Girl subculture. Where he couldn’t find scenes, he would set them up, using props from his surroundings. An entire set of photos revolves around people demonstrating “alternative uses” for hip baths and lampshades.