All thanks to his niece Victoria Loughran and her husband Conor
Acclaimed podcast The Hackney and Newham Social History Club, from Immediate Theatre and hosted by Sue Elliot Nicholls, showcases local voices and shared history from this part of east London, covering everything from migration to fashion to identity. In season three ‘Same Streets, Different Lives’, centres around the rediscovered photo collection of Bandele “Tex” Ajetunmobi, a Nigerian-British tailor and street photographer who documented life in east London from the 1940s to the 1980s.
Newham school teacher and Tex’s niece Victoria Loughran and her husband Conor helped to save Tex’s photographs from being lost, and now they’re held in places like the Tate and Autograph. Victoria’s nephew and fashion photographer Tracer Ital’s work and career has been inspired by Tex’s legacy.
Across seven episodes of the podcast (we’ve edited down the transcript for length) the story of Tex, his photographs and their rescue is told. In his foreword, Tracer explains just how important these photographs are:
“When I first held my uncle Tex’s camera, it felt heavier than metal and glass. He’d walked the streets of east London carrying it for decades, capturing a spirit that went overlooked. The mundane became something else when he looked at it. He caught people as they really were: quietly proud, fiercely unique and full of life. His shots were never about glamour or style, although they often had that in spades; They were about connection. You could feel the life in them.
“For years his work sat in boxes and came dangerously close to being lost forever. Thanks to the care of my aunt Victoria and her husband Conor, those negatives survived. A record not only of a man’s passion, but of a London that is not so lost after all. Turns out the city doesn’t change so much as it keeps moving forward. The stories Tex told are still being written.
“Since his death his camera has sat on a shelf. Decades may have passed but today I’m picking it up. This isn’t about nostalgia at all, I’m continuing a conversation that never ended. The city may have changed and half the buildings might be gone now but East London still stands. More than brick dust and mortar. The faces and feelings he documented are still here, still the same, still different to anywhere else. I don’t know if I’ll see what he saw. But I’m looking.”
Victoria: When he died and they were bringing things round, I said to Conor, where’s all his pictures? Where are the pictures that he took? Because he took loads. And that’s where it all began really.
It’s a Shoreditch winter morning. A street sweeper clears last night’s overspill from bars and restaurants, hen parties and happily swaying drinkers. The same streets where Victoria Loughran’s uncle Tex stood 75 years ago. Wedged between Curtain Road and an emptied under the arches nightclub, at One Rivington place is an imposing chunk of David Adjaye architecture from the 2000s. It’s home to some, not all, of the photographs Victoria’s uncle Tex took.
V: Oh yes, that’s a picture of him.
A wary looking Tex in a collared checked wall overcoat, prints stuck to a fake brick wall in a flat off Cable Street.
V: And here again, that’s him.
A front room with TV, flowers and cigarettes on the table.
V: He’s not very comfortable having his picture taken.
Tex liked being the other side of the lens.
V: That’s how he would like himself to be seen.
He’s got his suit in the background with a dry cleaning bag over the top. He’s got his bling on, his ring. The pic was done with a self-timer. He’s got his cigarette in one of those long cigarette holders. So he’s got his cigarette in his cigarette holder, his shades, pork pie hat.
V: That was a self-portrait. I know that. My mum said he took that himself.
Black and white photographs, some colour, are carefully moved from A2 sized boxes to a tabletop in a temperature-controlled room.
V: Don’t know what camera he brought over because he did work in a photographer’s studio in Lagos. He did have lots. If he liked that camera, he’d use that camera or he’d use that camera. He had had several. He wasn’t precious about them, but he did like the twin lenses a lot.
Shot after shot spanning decades from the late 1940s onwards. People going about their lives.
V: These were all new working-class people and he made them look like glamorous models.
V: They came over 1947. Christopher, the oldest brother, stayed for a bit, and then he went back to Nigeria, and my mum and Tex stayed in England. He lived a lifestyle that people didn’t really approve of. He went out a lot and he drank and he had friends basically. We would probably think it was quite tame but obviously my mum didn’t approve. His brother didn’t approve. I think they would have rather he gave up the photography, he wasn’t making money from it and da-da-da-da-da. But I don’t think they saw the passion that he had.
With quick thinking and some plastic carrier bags, Victoria and husband Conor took matters into their own hands thirty odd years ago. At times, it’s left them with more questions than answers.
V: It was important. He didn’t have children and I wanted him to leave something. I didn’t want him just to be forgotten.
Tex was a face in this area for over 40 years. In his pictures, some of the same friends appear over and over. Tex lived in flats and single rooms, sometimes with company, in what’s now the spiritual home of the East End walking tour. As a younger man, Victoria’s uncle Tex had done some tailoring, traveling around Nigeria, Sierra Leone and Ghana in the 1940s.
Conor: When I met him first, he was an old man, you know, probably wasn’t that old. All was turned out. You know, his 1950s, 60s Levi’s and US Navy beer sport cap, leather jacket, fist full of rings and the cowboy shirts. This obsession almost with Americana.
V: Yeah, there were lots of traders around there. He bought the material by the yard, so they got their stuff made properly on Petticoat Lane. That was Morris’s dad, actually.
Who was Morris?
V: Morris is the guy sitting on the car, the white guy sitting on the car with Alison.
On the bonnet of a bronze yellow, mustard-coloured, MG Roadster. Victoria only learnt Morris’ name in the early 2000s. And how lovely as well to get pictures of mixed couples in those days, just so that we all know that they were there.
V: You wouldn’t have known. You wouldn’t have known.
V: There’s a really beautiful picture of two little boys in colour. And though it’s a really vibrant picture, when you look closely, one of them’s not really dressed properly. The clothes are a bit torn, they’re a bit raggedy. If you look at them, they’re oh urchins. And that’s obviously how we got those two boys. They’re quite happy to pose for him. They must have had incredibly hard lives. They still wanted to sit and have their picture taken. He’s a very talented photographer that manages to do that. Brings out the best in people, no matter what they’ve been through. That’s a lovely, lovely picture. I love that. That’s childhood. That was my childhood. You know what I mean?
Victoria Loughran’s uncle Tex lived around Whitechapel in the old borough of Stepney, now Tower Hamlets. Victoria was living in Newham with her mum.
V: I think back now, it was like we were a single parent, immigrant family of Catholics. And there were loads of us. We were really, really scrabbly children, but we were there having our photographs taken properly and looking good and stuff like that. Honestly, he was fun. He was laughter. He was that uncle. He came and he played with the children. I’m going to see my nieces and nephews, and then he’s argue with my mum, and then he’d leave. I mean, obviously, because of his polio and his disability, as a child you don’t notice. You just see someone who’s giving you time and sitting there and talking to you and things like that. He remembered your life. And as a child with a busy mum, when you’re youngest you get forgotten about, but he never forgot, but he was lovely. He’d have his dinner, argue with my mum, and then leave.
C: He was out there just investing in his craft. He could afford to do what he wanted to do. Had a drink, didn’t need to be financially successful. He was okay.
V: It was the lens that was really important for him rather than the make. And this was one of the best lenses, I’m told.
It’s a twin lens reflex. The camera uses inside reflection. Picture a ship’s periscope, where you look forward and see up. This works kind of in reverse.
C: So you get 12 shots. So it’s an expensive pastime. The negatives are much larger than 35mm, so the quality of the print is probably three, four times what you get on a normal 35mm camera. I mean, probably outstripped now by some digital, but in the day, those were kind of what people wanted.
In 1994, after a night playing cards, Bandele Ajetunmobi, Victoria Loughran’s uncle, passed away.
V: I was like, okay, I’m just going to let you know that, and I said his proper name, I said, oh, Bandele Ajetunmobi. Loads of people were like, who’s that? And I said Tex. Oh my goodness, Uncle Tex. Loads of people referred to him as Uncle Tex. I’d went for a very brief half hour, and I was like, he’s my uncle. And then it was lots of phone calls back. He’d gone out, had a nice night out, and then he came home. That was it. And this was a testament to him, because he was a single man on his own, and people knew within hours.
Victoria’s mum and uncle Tex had a stormy relationship. Not without good moments, still. In grief, in the aftermath, it’s stressful dealing with family stuff. Paperwork, flat contents, thousands of photographs of the East End. A few hundred of Tex’s pictures are looked after by Autograph in Hackney.
C: In that true sense of street photography, it’s stopping people at a point in time, the day-to-day life of people as they move past him.
Photos are sorted through with gloved hands. A girl’s first Holy Communion, a boy on a special family visit. Snaps on the street and posed portraits came to light after Tex had gone.
V: I mean, people that he knew saw him as a photographer, so if they had a wedding or a family occasion, they would ask him to come along and take the pictures.
C: When we were going through his papers, you would see things like two copies, 3M24, five shillings, you know, so he was printing photographs for people to have those moments.
V: I just knew it was just going to be binned like a house clearance, but what you consider important in a house clearance isn’t what he would have considered. You can’t throw away a photograph. That’s somebody’s very old fashioned thinking probably. When we arrived, they were actually in the skip. We knew we had to take them. I didn’t know what I was going to do with them. These people, because they were people at this point, were just in a bin. I don’t know why I took them. I really don’t. I just thought it was important. We just put them in carrier bags and took them home. We literally parked them for a good couple of years, put them in a suitcase and we put it away. I had things to do. When we moved into our own house, that was when I took them out, which would have been a good few years later, wouldn’t it? And initially, I suppose, I was thinking, well, I’m going to see if there’s anybody here that we know and that we can pass them on to. And I didn’t really recognise anybody. But I recognise people having a life that intrigued me.
And an intriguing past.
V: When I started seeing all the stuff that we had, I did make some calls, trawling around everywhere. I’ve said, I’ve got all these pictures, they seem to range from the 1940s to the late 70s, early 80s, taken by a black photographer. You need to see them.
Established archives and museums couldn’t help.
V: I spoke to a lovely man in Bradford, and he said, I’ve never heard of anything like that before. I’m really sorry, because I don’t know who you can go to. Everybody else is interested in…It was either American or Windrush. You have to be the vanguard. You’re just going to have to do it yourself. You’re just going to have to do it. And I went, no, OK then. And it was like, OK, he said, there’s nothing else. I may as well do it. And we made the contact sheets, didn’t we? We made up contact sheets.
Victoria wanted Tex’s pictures to be bigger. Victoria and Conor found an enlarger for sale on Brick Lane.
V: We put boards over the bathroom and we did it in the bath. We started developing them, the black and white ones.
C: I don’t think anyone else would have thought, you know, okay, this can happen. If other people can do this, I can do it. You know, we were young still and we had two kids, not a lot of money. And for the exhibition prints, I can’t even remember now, but I would panic if I thought about it. You know, it was expensive.
Tex’s pictures needed framing. Victoria and husband Conor went to Ikea.
C: A friend of ours gave us some money because he wanted the exhibition to go ahead. My brother drove us to Thurrock to load them all out, bring them by.
So you put this exhibition on in which gallery?
V: The Spitz Gallery, doesn’t exist anymore. And I was invited on to BBC Radio London.
Victoria talked to local TV and radio, hoping people in Tex’s photographs might recognise themselves and maybe turn up to the show. Cab drivers assemble. The Loughrans need you. Getting ready for an exhibition. Quite fair skinned, mixed race, kids with blondie, curly hair, but these big beautiful dark eyes and their matching outfits. Victoria and husband Conor had printed her uncle Tex’s pictures themselves.
V: This is a really happy portrait, but then people would say, oh, imagine the racism they would have faced and imagine the abuse they would have got. But we’re not getting that.
In late September 2003, the first ever exhibition of Tex’s photographs opened to the public. Tex’s show opened at a gallery there, now gone. The Spitz.
V: You went in and you could say, oh, that looks like my uncle. And even if it wasn’t, it was like, oh, gosh, I remember that. I remember that jacket. Do you remember those glasses? It was nostalgia. And it was packed. I was very firm that I wanted it to be positive. We have so many pictures of us in the East End looking poor and looking unhappy. I was very conscious also of the fact that there was a wealth of other pictures, like the fights.
A punch thrown in a pub doorway, men in winter coats, painted wooden snug. Victoria called the exhibition Tales from a Lonely Londoner. It’s a reference to a book. The Lonely Londoners is a 1956 novel by Trinidad-born writer Sam Selvin. It follows a group of men from the islands of Trinidad, Jamaica and Barbados. Then there’s Cap. Cap is from a well-to-do Nigerian family. He drops out of law school, gets cut off. Cap wears a green striped suit, spends his money on cigarettes and women, doing his best to swerve a regular job. The book is bittersweet. It shows the rush and excitement of navigating life in 50s London. Then, the growing awareness and disappointment of being a single man from somewhere else in 1950s London.
V: When people started to come forward, it was lovely. But then I was getting stories like, oh, and that happened to them, and that happened to them. But these were like snapshots. And photographs are snapshots. It was like, their stories can’t be just this.
Victoria got in touch with a member of an internationally famous photographers collective, Magnum, Photos, not PI. The photographer was one of the Exit Photography Group, with Paul Trevor, that looked at life in Britain’s inner cities in the 1970s.
V: We had Chris Steele Perkins. He volunteered. I was mad actually, now I’m thinking about it, because I just phoned up these people randomly and said, come and help me do this. They probably thought, oh god, I’ve got to shut her up. And then I got the call from Carol and it was like, oh, right, okay.
V: Carol from the V&A. Carol Tulloch. She did an exhibition on Black British style. I think that was a picture that they chose.
C: Morris and Alison. That was his MG and his first girlfriend.
Carol Tulloch with Shaun Cole put together a first, a national museum exhibition that shone light on the day-to-day looks and creations of Black British individuals, clothes made and worn.
C: The initial interest actually came from a youth culture agency because they wanted the fashion element.
More people were seeing Tex’s pictures.
C: We had people wanting it for album covers.
Tex’s name was starting to get known. And Morris and Alison’s, thank you, Internet. Art people in the UK and further afield were on notice.
C: When it was hanging in the Tate with the other photographers in the Stand Firm inna Inglan exhibition, you kind of see the different viewpoints. It’s funny when Dennis Morris saw the archive originally. He said, what you see is an amateur in the true sense of it. You turn out professional photographs but you don’t get paid for it.
V: You have to have faith behind you to be able to do it. You can’t just do it. He could do this and he could carry on taking photographs. Basically, he was only judged by his family really. Everybody else was like, oh my goodness, he’s great. He takes these pictures and they’re wonderful. Nobody can do that now. Everybody has to think, am I going to make money? What’s the next big thing? Will I get this? Will I get that? Will I get fame? Rather than just do what you want to do, cause you love it? And there’s nothing wrong with that. I got to the stage where I thought, this needs to be handled by someone better than me.
And here we are at Autograph, Shoreditch. Autograph began life in the late 80s out of a small office in Brixton, South London, formerly known as the Association of Black Photographers.
V: If we hadn’t had influences like Tex, I don’t think we would have taken any chances. My brothers particularly were very much, oh, I’m going to give this a go. They never felt that they couldn’t do something or that they shouldn’t do something. And I think that’s a bit how I was brought up with the influences that I had.
Chris, one of Victoria’s brothers, once went under the name Lord Creation. Another brother, Alex was one half of experimental indie dance crossover act A.R. Kane. ‘Pump Up the Volume’, possibly the first big hit, using a lot of sampled music.
(Victoria’s nephew, Tracer Ital on Instagram, is a photographer)
Tray works in art and fashion, doing film and photography for Prada, Chanel, Louis Vuitton, for fashion media like Harpers, ES Mag and Vogue.
Tracer: I grew up in north west London, but east London was the coolest place in the world to me, you know.I was in Stratford a lot. I think every weekend we were here. My gran’s house was like the centre of the world to us.
Thoughts turn to Tex’s pictures.
T: I actually had his portrait shot as my WhatsApp profile picture for ages. I look at that and I’m like, I wish I was as cool as that.
Is that the one with the cigarette holder?
T: Yeah, I absolutely loved that one. There’s one with this cool fella. It’s like sat on the hood of a car. That to me is like… That’s a sick image.
Guess who? Morris and Alison.
T: You know, I wonder where those people are now. What do they think of how things have changed? Um, shopkeeper. With the glasses and the leather jacket.
It’s interesting that you’re picking the styles as well because you’re a fashion photographer.
T: I think, yeah, maybe it’s like that’s why they gel with me. You could take any of those images now and we could get published as a cover today.
This is coming from the man who’s shot with Letitia Wright and John Boyega. Famous names. Film stars. The people in Tex’s pictures look just like they could be.
V: But then you have got that gift that Tex could do where he brought out the best in people. You don’t just see models, you actually see people.
T: Yeah, I think that’s what it’s all about at the end of the day.
It’s why Tray’s here. Victoria wants Tray to have Tex’s cameras.
V: It can’t just stay on a shelf.
The people in Tex’s photographs are mostly anonymous. A lot are no longer with us. Some are, but they’re unwell. Here’s what we do and don’t know. Morris Wolfe and Alison, we don’t know Alison’s surname. Phyllis, who runs shebeens in Whitechapel, says the woman in the mixed couple who’s proud of her wedding ring, episode one, could be Auntie Louise. Her son Robert agrees. We’ve identified Shan, Azzy, Kathy and Maureen, but not the enamel pin worn by the proud looking men. Jimmy Newman was the rag and bone man. Other people in the photographs are traceable, but don’t want to be reminded.
T: You’ve got some really cool stuff here. You’ve got a lot more, I didn’t even realise you had this much stuff. There’s cameras I don’t even know, never even seen before. Wow.
There’s three shelves stacked with old cameras, stacked, one camera on top of another, on top of another. On the bottom shelf is stacks and stacks and stacks of film.
V: I know, yeah. I’ve been trying to give him loads of cameras for a while now.
T: But do you know what, though? There was a bit of fear in me when you first… Yeah, I was like, I’m not ready for that. It’s a lot. These are some big shoes to fill. These are some big shoes to fill. Honestly, I’ve had projects that I’ve been sitting on for a long time now. I think it’s time to shoot them.
T: Every generation gets very caught up in their own world, if that makes sense. And it’s not until you get a bit older, you start looking back, you’re like, whoa, it’s like every generation has been through this stuff in their own way. I think as much as we think that we’re living completely different, no, humans are the same as they’ve always ever been. All the people in those pictures were no different to me or to my friends, or, you know, the same experiences that we are growing up, we had, you know, interracial couples finding love, going out and dancing. Every generation kind of builds upon on what the last generation did a bit. Even now, actually, the sounds that we dance to now, they reference him now all the time.
To listen to the full podcast series search The Hackney and Newham History Social Club wherever you get your podcasts
Photographs taken from the Autograph online gallery.
