“Listen, my friend, listen to the present, the right now, it’s all around us, painted like a target, red, white and blue. Sail into the target like a dart, a fluke bull’s eye in a dirty pub.”
― Leonard Cohen, Beautiful Losers
British photographer Martin Salter shows us people much like ourselves at a certain time. The scenes he shares are familiar but Salter shows us a diferent view. In this series of pictures he takes us behind the bar in British pubs, clubs and dos in the 1990s. That’s use on the other side, getting the drinks in.
“I travelled a fair bit in the mid to late 1980’s – shooting film again as digital was still way in the future. Film was expensive then as it is now so on a 5 month trip to India I could only afford 15 rolls of film. That’s around 900 photos in total. Unbelievable really to think that is all you had. This of course made me quite disciplined around shooting so when I started shooting medium format in the late 90s I often was comfortable shooting only 10 or 12 images per roll. You had to make sure you got something so you focused very hard on making this happen.”
– Martin Salter in The Game
“What I describe as my ‘golden period’ of photography in the UK was very much about nostalgia for a post-war Britain which was fading fast. I felt I needed to capture it all – portraits, landscapes, buildings, and events. For the past10 years, I photographed the small English town where I moved, as well as continuing to shoot sporadically on the streets of London.”
– Martin Salter
You can follow Martin Salter at his website and instagram.
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