There will be a touch of Tinseltown around London Metropolitan University this month as it hosts a new exhibition and book signing by Hollywood legend Steven Berkoff.
There will be a touch of Tinseltown around London Metropolitan University this month as it hosts a new exhibition and book signing by Hollywood legend Steven Berkoff.
The star of major films such as Octopussy, Rambo, Beverley Hills Cop and A Clockwork Orange, Steven is also a talented photographer whose latest exhibition, East End Photos, will run for a month at The Sir John Cass Faculty of Art, Architecture and Design.
The show draws on Steven’s experiences growing up in Stepney, East London, and coincides with the launch of The East End Archive at The Cass.
Born in Stepney, director, actor and playwright Steven was given his first camera by “an enlightened cousin” as an 11 year old boy. Ten years later his brother-in-law bought him an enlarger and showed him how to print his own pictures.
“Then one day somebody sold me a second-hand Rolleiflex and now I had an amazing machine”, said Steven. “From then on I never stopped taking pictures. The camera became a way of communicating my feelings about sights and people, and I started to record the people who were part of my environment in the East End of London.”
The exhibition will offer a snapshot of life in the East End of yesteryear, a world which has long since vanished. It was an awareness of this changing environment that was behind much of Steven’s photography.
“The East End was changing rapidly and I felt I had to record it before it vanished forever - at the time however I did not realise quite how fast it would disappear”, he said. “The area was largely Jewish and this made it fascinating, since the early immigrants came with an amazing potpourri of cultures from a score of different peoples.
“I was fortunate enough to capture some images of that life before it faded away along with the people who made it so memorable.”
The exhibition is housed in The Cass Gallery, in the heart of the creative East End – a fitting venue for Steven’s work. He will also be visiting The Cass on 12 November to sign copies of his new book, East End Photographs.
Susan Andrews, Senior Lecturer on the MA Photography course at The Cass, said: “Berkoff has left us with a unique historic portrait of the East End area from the 60s and 70s. Images of the people, the shops and streets that we would have encountered daily, of a changing East End that would not have been recorded so gently without Berkoff’s insightful eye.”
East End Photographs by Steven Berkoff
1 November – 29 November
The Cass Gallery
The Sir John Cass Gallery of Art, Architecture and Design
Central House
59-63 Whitechapel High Street
London, E1 7PF
Nearest tube: Aldgate East
Wed – Friday 11am – 7pm
Sat 11am - 5pm
Exhibition runs during Photo Month www.photomonth.org
Read more about The Sir John Cass Faculty of Art, Architecture and Design.