Photography on the Common

Street Life in London, a collaboration by the
photographer John Thomson and the journalist Adolphe Smith, is a pioneering
work of social documentation. It combines photomechanical illustrations with humanizing
descriptions of the city’s working classes, including street types such as card
dealers, cabmen, and flower women. Pairing a traveling photographer with “donkey-boys,”
Thomson pictures vendors in Clapham Common, a South London park. The
accompanying text details the “somewhat humdrum life” of photographers on the
Common, who idle away hours in the damp British weather waiting for customers whom
they must persuade to endure the “painful ordeal” of having their portraits
taken. Nevertheless, the resulting photographs are prized since they, in
Smith’s words, “serve to recall the past, to revive latent affection for the
absent; they never do any harm and sometimes awaken the better and more tender
instincts of our nature.”