London (CNN) — For four decades, London’s underground transport network has been Bob Mazzer’s photographic playground. He has collected surprisingly intimate shots in what, for many, is a most impersonal environment.
At times Mazzer’s subjects stare straight down the camera; others are unaware of their role as protagonist in a decades-long story of the city.
Mazzer, 65, was born in East London to a Jewish couple. His dad, Mottel, was a cabbie and his mother, Jean, a cultured woman who encouraged her son into the arts. Mazzer was given his first camera, an Ilford Sporti, for his Bar Mitzvah aged 13.
He recalls taking his first picture, of the London Hilton, before being encouraged by an arts teacher who showed the budding photographer images by Irving Penn and Henri Cartier-Bresson.
London-born Bob Mazzer has been photographing in the city’s underground transport network for four decades. This shot, from the 1980s, is one of his favorites. The woman, making a call from a public phone, was so theatrical he assumed she was an actress being filmed. “She was done up like a starlet,” he says.
Smoking on the tube was commonplace when Mazzer started his project. Here, a woman in heart-shaped “Lolita” glasses lights up in the early 1980s.
This pair, photographed in 1971, caught Mazzer’s his eye. He wondered what happened to the boy, and if the two were together. “I always wanted [the book] to be the bible, because then it became even more pithy,” he says. Mazzer can be seen in the window reflection.
This musician had clambered on an escalator to play his guitar in the early 80s, after Bob Marley had died. The musician had pinned a picture of Marley to the ceiling.
This image, from Stockwell station, has become known as “Clockwell.” It was snapped the exact moment the man dropped his hands, Mazzer says. “It looks like he was just standing there but he was actually busy… all the time, and he [dropped his hands] for a moment.” It was “just a one off — there was no lead up, or lead off. It was just one shot.”
Another Mazzer favorite, from the mid ’80s, is of this woman with a nose piercing. “I love the fact the other woman turned around just at that moment and is kind of looking at me a bit suspiciously,” Mazzer says, “but the woman I’m photographing is just giving me the straight eyeball.”
In this image, also from the mid ’80s, a man reads the newspaper with two pairs of glasses. “Lots of people think it’s a magnifying glass,” Mazzer writes in his book, Bob Mazzer Underground. “But it is another pair of spectacles.”
This image of an inter-racial couple is another of Mazzer’s favorites, from around 1987. It was like “Mondrian and good vibes and equality,” he says.
Mazzer recalls this fight, which he photographed around 1981, as starting after the man in braces obstructed the underground doors. The other man politely asked him to let the doors shut, but, as Mazzer’s book details: “‘Braces’ harangued him with finger in face, very aggressive,” not realizing the other man “was a black belt and about to rip him apart.”‘
Many of Mazzer’s images capture intimate moments, such as this kiss before the doors close on a tube in Baker Street. “What drew me to it was the contrast between him and her,” Mazzer says. “He seemed completely disinterested,” while she was “really kissing him.”
In his book, Mazzer explains these woman were the underground’s cleaners. “In no way did I intend to make them figures of fun, but it is funny,” he says.
Mazzer’s images have captured many late night scenes, as he traveled to and from his work at a cinema. In this one, boys clamber up and jump over a closed gate. Mazzer notes how they’d taken the little stools used by ticket collectors to assist their escape. “There’s nothing like that you can climb over anymore, it’s all ticketed barriers,” he says.
Mazzer likes this “lads” image as it flips what could have been seen as a threatening group into a friendly one. “They were the tail end of the mods,” Mazzer says. “I poked the camera at them and they just beamed at me, and what can you do, you have to photograph them.”
Here, a man takes comfort from his dog. “I remember being so touched by the whole scene,” Mazzer says, noting the rarity of a adult sitting on the floor. It seemed “so sweet…a man’s best friend in his hour of need.”
While many of Mazzer’s subjects are caught unawares, this man with a bright red flower gazes straight down the barrel of the camera. “He was so amendable to being photographed,” Mazzer says. “He was just cool, he looked so much like he’d just come from a jazz club.”
The underground has evolved from a place where you could smoke and drink, to the bright lights of today. Forty years ago, they were “pretty grotty and the stations were rough,” Mazzer says. This, image from the early ’80s, appealed to Mazzer because of the seating arrangement. “They were sitting as far away from each other as possible.”
This image was taken outside the Oxford Circus tube station, in central London. Mazzer recalls thinking “thank you” for this woman, in her pink coat, for suddenly poking her tongue out as people poured “like ants” down into the underground.
The photographs have revealed how fashion has changed over the decades. Here, a woman hides behind a leaf as her photograph is taken in the late 1990s. “She let me take several pictures with the leaf not in front of her face, then did that just for fun, really,” Mazzer says.
Mazzer says photographing the underground has shown how people have changed from reading newspapers and smoking, to becoming attached to their iPads and smartphones, like these men from 2013.
Mazzer, in a self-portrait taken while he was at the Hornsey College of Art. The snap, taken in the the early 70s, was designed to capture the passenger next to him. Mazzer liked his hat and double-breasted herringbone coat with, with its huge lapel and “pointy bits.”
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
Gallery: London’s underground life
Mazzer began taking photographs on the London Underground as he commuted to and from his work as a cinema projectionist. “It felt like a party that I was the official photographer of,” he says. Eventually, “I’d been doing it so long that it was my job.
“No one ever protested, or ever complained, or ever tried to stop me. So I kind of felt by accident that everyone thought it was cool.”
What he’s captured is an unexpectedly personal flip-book of London since the 1970s: The fashion, the buskers, drunks, runaways and love stories.
Mazzer describes himself as a “nosy-parker” and “social butterfly,” who says he has “always seen beautiful things.”
His images capture “shape, and form, and I love the textures, and I love the lighting and I like the poses. I like seeing what comes off people when I point the camera at them.”
Mazzer says they merge into “this kind of mish-mash of colours and texture and atmosphere and smiles and scowls. When it works it’s really great. I look at some of these myself and think, ‘how did I do that?’”
The insides of the carriages also reveal London’s changing times, as the newspapers and cigarettes which once littered the floors made way for bright lights and iPads.
When he first started, the Underground “did look pretty grotty,” Mazzer says. “The stations were rough and that has a character which comes over in the pictures. I think people identify with that and it gives it this historical edge.” Now, Mazzer adds, the lights are “neon and there’s no atmosphere.”
East London blog Spitalfields Life first championed the then little-known Mazzer’s work in 2013, and was bombarded with responses. Spitalfields Life Books has now released the images in hardback, titled Bob Mazzer Underground, with a debut exhibition to be held in Shoreditch’s Howard Griffin Gallery from June 12.
Many of the subjects, Mazzer says, may be unaware they will feature. “I did photograph a lot of people on the Tube, hundreds and hundreds. There are a lot of people out there who I’d like to think [might say] ‘dammit, I wish I wasn’t in this book.’”
His favorites include the theatrical peroxide blonde in the midst of a dramatic public phone call, the inter-racial couple in red and blue colors, which “was like Mondrian and good vibes and equality,” and the so-called “Clockwell” man whose perfectly upright body is topped by Stockwell Tube’s clock.
And, even as he instinctively snapped scenes that caught his eye, Mazzer knew the project had gravitas. “When you shoot something for 30 to 40 years, even though I didn’t consciously have a plan, I felt there was something even I didn’t know about yet. And you suddenly become aware that you are documenting something that is going to have a historical bent to it.”
After he has finished the interview, Mazzer is driven off, past Brick Lane’s famous 24-hour bagel bakery. The doors frame a sweet scene of a woman with her little girl, wheeling a plastic scooter. Mazzer, his camera sticking out the window, captures the moment.
EXPLORE: Bob Mazzer’s images, from the 1970s until present day
Article source: http://edition.cnn.com/2014/06/04/business/bob-mazzer-london-underground/