The boy and the flag…

His mother remained silent as he spoke.  Her eyes fixed on the faded patterned plastic table cloth below her that her elbows ruffled as they rested upon.  In contrast, he with head upright and eyes fixed upon the camera; described how his son, and her grandson, had made his choice and had paid for it.  He was shot and killed: and left a teenager forever more.

I, like the reporter, perhaps had expected his pause to be followed by the gradual secretion of tears; but his eyes remained dry and still. The photograph below, is one taken by Vanley Burke in Handsworth, Birmingham in the early 1970’s; and is one of the photographs that etched itself upon my psyche.  This image, as well as a body of work entitled ‘Born to work’ by the photographer Nick Hedges made me want to take photographs seriously.

It would then, be a strange quirk of fate, that a few years ago now I would find myself in a room with Vanley and with the boy from that photograph, who now as a grown man, was being filmed for a news segment by Newsnight as he spoke of how his son had been shot and killed in a gang related murder.

The strange twists of life are not ours to control, which is why perhaps that the photograph affords us with such solace.  As of course, it is so much easier for us to look back at the preserved certainties of our past than at a future beyond the hands of our making.

Boy with flag. Copyright Vanley Burke. Circa 1970

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