Street vendor, London

This essay originally appeared in New Zealand Art at Te Papa (Te Papa Press, 2018).

The woman looks down at something she is holding in her hands. There is an air of calmness and focus as she works; perhaps she is making a small posy. The use of soft focus gives a dream-like air to the scene despite the obvious shabbiness of the London street. The seller has a solid little stall and there is a formality in how she conducts her transactions — she is not just an itinerant vendor walking about with a basket, but has created a kind of open-air counter that she sits behind, like a regular shopkeeper. Adding to the sense of intent about her enterprise is the knowledge that when she arrives and packs up, she would need helpers or a vehicle to take things home.

Common in the early to mid-twentieth century, pictorialism was an expressive approach to photography, inspired by art. Flower sellers had always been an archetypal subject in art and photographers — particularly those working in the pictorialist style — followed existing conventions of fine art, not least its subject matter, in an attempt to give their work credibility. Flower sellers on
the streets of London had been known since medieval times.

Much art and photography documenting particularly young and pretty sellers takes a romantic view of working-class life: examples spring to mind by such artists as TB Kennington and Jules Bastien-Lepage. The profession, as portrayed in art, appears to have been dominated by women typically characterised as ‘gypsies’ or those down on their luck. The woman here seems altogether more robust and genteel.

Street photography in London was popular in the first half of the twentieth century. In the 1930s, the period during which New Zealand photographer Marion Kirker was working in London, photographers such as Anglo-German Bill Brandt were also out in the street, snapping away. The Brandt archive includes at least one comparably idealised photograph of an elderly woman flower seller in the city.
Looking at Kirker’s small number of surviving photographs of street vendors, it appears that in turning her hand to this modern and immediate style of photography she resisted the stereotypically sentimental portrayal of the flower seller while retaining pictorialist influences by shooting the scene in soft focus.

Lissa Mitchell