Swinging Back

60s London saw both the reinvention of broadsheet journalism, with the launch in 1962 of The Sunday Times Colour Magazine (leading with a profile of Peter Blake: 'Pioneer of Pop'), and the elevation of advertising from a staid mixture of graphic design and copy writing to a happening young profession for creative types with metropolitan tastes. It was in keeping with these ground-breaking developments in hitherto conservative media that the decade should have been labelled with a journalistic catch-phrase, 'Swinging London', by Time magazine in 1966. 30 years later, the media has revived the idea, largely as a response to the Britpop generation of artists, designers and musicians. This time it was Newsweek's turn to provide the definitive headline: 'London Rules'. Thanks to Time's catch-phrase, 60s London is now remembered - and revived - as a unity of pop cultural activity, encompassing a network of reference points in which the principal players, places and happenings were all linked in intention as well as by geography. But for Dorothy Bohm, a Jewish Lithuanian emigré photographer who settled in Hampstead with her husband in 1956, the pageant took place within a city whose remaining Victorian/ Edwardian constitution and lingering ambience of post-war austerity were as vital and visible as its latest developments as the Pop Capital of the world. As Amanda Hopkinson points out in her introductory essay to Bohm's photographs of 60s London: 'Dorothy's images are not the Swinging London beloved of Bailey, Duffy and Donovan, although it can be glimpsed in the small print of passing fashions. They are the story behind the banner headlines, classically presented, and infinitely more complex in content.' Paradoxically, it is the subtle traces of archetypal Swinging London imagery in Bohm's photographs that makes them doubly eloquent of the exuberant zeitgeist that was permeating and promoting the capital in the 60s. Minidresses, longer hair, a Bob Dylan T-shirt and the burgeoning paraphernalia of consumer society find their place within a city that still appears blackened and institutional, its children and pensioners maintaining a near Dickensian countenance on either side of the new styles and new values. Rather than a mediation of their times with an eye to fashionability or conscious topicality, these photographs describe the reality of an accelerating urban spirit - the flight of one generation from the war-hardened but weary values of their elders - by capturing those moments of vulnerability, stillness or civic pantomime in which the subject is unrehearsed. Thus, in book form, we find a portrait of the coolly blonde proprietor (or customer) of a Hampstead 'Antique boutique' regarding the camera with a modish self-assurance mirrored in the facing photograph of an amiably clownish and top-hatted young man - reminiscent of Tommy Steele - who is minding his junk stall in Earlham Street and clearly delighted to have had his photograph taken. Both images convey the obsession with Victoriana and antique bric-a-brac that was a hallmark of 60s London, and found its way into the plot of Antonioni's Blow Up (1966) as much as the Regency styling of pop fashions and the vogue for art nouveau. In Bohm's treatment of the antiquarian theme, however, her subjects pursue the less cosmetic strand of the relationship between youth and old age, archaism and modernity, that was pivotal to London's cultural identity in the 60s. Hence, in her portrait of two hip couples sitting beneath a Schweppes umbrella outside a King's Road cafe, it is the marble bust of a stern Victorian patriarch and statesman, decoratively (and ironically) placed at their feet which provides the animating counterpoint to the young people's unisex shoulder-length hair, relaxed levity and bottles of Fanta orangeade. Similarly, the 17th-century livery of the schoolboys from Christ Hospital, Horsham, making their traditional procession through the City of London, is forced into deeper anachronism by the pupils' long hair and a glimpse of a fashionably dressed young woman between their ranks. These, after all, might include the first generation of public schoolboys to be inspired by Lindsay Anderson's anarchic fantasy, If... (1968). The City street, by contrast, is slow to shed its air of battered imperialism. Bohm's photographs of London's squares, streets and hoardings, from the residential blossom of Holland Park to the (literally) totemistic height of the Post Office Tower - transmitting a fantasy of the space age above the chimneys of an end-of-terrace house - all possess a quietude that suggests the slow abandonment of a previous order, or, at the very least, a rearrangement of the social hierarchy. Already, the older ladies of Knightsbridge appear somewhat shabby in their gentility, while the residue of the 'servant classes' display an unshakeable loyalty to an orthodoxy which is no longer in place. Time and again, in Bohm's images, which seem to analyse their times almost despite of themselves, there is the sense that the younger generation are assuming the confidence of a new aristocracy, notwithstanding the obvious rigidity of London's zoning of class. Rather than supporting the conventional mythologies of 60s London that one finds in British films of the period such as John Schlesinger's Darling (1966), Bohm's independent vision is in keeping with Norman Cohen's 1966 cinema adaptation of Geoffrey Fletcher's The London Nobody Knows - a documentary about the changing face of London, presented by James Mason, who picks his way from East End markets and the derelict Camden Palace to the enthusiastic popism of reinvented Chelsea. This is the same journey through district, class and change described by Bohm's photographs: from her virtual still life of the imposing edifice of Cannon Street station's arched wall, to her witnessing in street life of a generational desire for informality above all, she demonstrates with generous lucidity the complexities and awkwardness upon which the bright catch-phrase of 'Swinging London' is so precariously balanced.