Ricky Adam – Back to Back – PhotoBook Journal

Review by Hans Hickerson ·

Here’s a winning formula for doing photography: Carry your camera with you everywhere. Explore the world, what’s out there – people, places, life, reality. Be humble. Be patient. Look at your photographs and learn from them. Don’t let ideas or pre-conceived formulas keep you from recognizing and connecting with your strong images. Work with your photographs to shape them into stories. Eventually you will find your voice.

Ricky Adam seems to have done that in Back to Back, his book of photographs of people and places in Leeds, England. The title refers to the small, brick, back-to-back “terrace houses” – attached, single-family row houses. In Leeds and other cities in the U.K. they were often built cheaply during the Industrial Revolution to house factory workers. Today, as Adam explains in this introduction, they are a rite of passage for immigrants, students, and other newcomers to Leeds.

The images in Back to Back are grouped by seasons, Fall, Winter, Spring, and Summer. The perspective is that of someone in the street, although Adam also shows us interior scenes in kitchens, living rooms, bedrooms, restaurants, and shops. Adam was involved in BMX biking and he explored Leeds by bicycle. At the end of the book a map of the city shows locations photographed and there is also a list of photographs with their locations, so you can investigate further if you are interested.

Many of the photos include people. We see young men hanging out, a woman shopping, a woman walking with her children, and another woman with her children waiting at a bus stop. Many of the people we see are of African or South Asian descent, and they are perhaps recent immigrants. Others seem to be working-class folks. We do not see any upscale hipsters. Not many businesses either, just a small food store or two, a café, a hairdresser, and a pizza place. We do see quite a few children. As in Helen Levitt’s photographs the street is their playground and theater. They ride bikes, throw snowballs, play soccer, go to school, share a take-out pizza, and hang out with friends and siblings. In addition to people, we see cats, dogs, pigeons, and seagulls.

Some of Adam’s photographs stand out because of stories they tell. A narrow street strewn with trash bins that someone has overturned. A burned-out house, its walls blackened, its furniture dumped in front in the street. Two parked cars on a snowy street joined together with jumper cables. A trailer, parked in the street, piled improbably high with scrap metal.

Adam takes his camera indoors to reveal some of the neighborhood inhabitants in more intimate, collaborative portraits. We see a young woman playing an electric guitar, a middle-aged man cradling a ferret, a reggae musician in a home sound studio, people partying to live punk music, a young man in his school uniform sitting on his bed and looking out the window, a woman preparing food in her kitchen, and a bearded gent holding a rifle with telescopic sights.

Looking at the people, you wonder about Adam’s relationship to them. Were these people relative strangers, or perhaps neighbors and acquaintances? Were they friends? Did he compartmentalize and consider his own life and relationships off-limits or uninteresting? It’s hard to tell. For some of the pictures, Adam must have been invited inside, while for others he may have simply been passing by and asked if he could take a picture.

Photographs can be more interesting and mysterious when they provoke your curiosity, and it is OK not to have all the answers. Plus you realize that these pictures of Leeds do not claim to represent all of Leeds, just a slice of it, a personal sample, a guided tour. If you visited Leeds today you might see some of the same sights or perhaps something completely different. Who knows, maybe in 30 years people will look at Back to Back and think nostalgically about the Old Leeds, about how it used to be before everything changed.

Hans Hickerson, Editor of the PhotoBook Journal, is a photographer and photobook artist from Portland, Oregon.

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Ricky Adam – Back to Back

Photographer: Ricky Adam (Born 1974, Northern Ireland, lives in Northern Ireland)

Language: English

Text: Ricky Adam, S J Bradley, Aidan Winterburn

Design: Ricky Adam, Ashleigh Armitage

Printing: Narayana Press, Denmark

Hardcover with inset photo; sewn binding; 80 photographs; 144 pages; 8.5 x 11 inches; ISBN 978-1-3999-8827-8

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