In the late sixties, in Dalston in East London, there was a church, St. Mark’s, with a choir and a photography club. One day, an eight-year-old choirboy picked up a camera, learned how to use it, and started an extraordinary journey of image-making, celebrity, and famous friends.
Dennis Morris started his journey by persuading friends and neighbours in Dalston to pose for him. He persuaded his mum to let him put up a white sheet against the living-room wall, borrowed a single spotlight from his church, and made a series of amazing, candid, affectionate portraits of the community in which he lived. It is a glorious record of the Caribbean residents of the East End of London, and if that were all there was to this exhibition, that would be enough, but Dennis Morris didn’t stop with living-room portraits. He photographed a demonstration and sold the picture to the Daily Mirror for £16. He ventured out of his East End comfort zone into the Sikh community of Southall, and employed his patented mixture of chutzpah and charm to take another beautiful series of portraits of another community, knocking on strangers’ doors to ask if they would let a 16-year-old kid take their picture.
Dennis Morris
Southall streets, 1976
© Dennis Morris
The big next step in his career involved finding out where Bob Marley and the Wailers were playing, hanging around outside the stage door, and persuading Marley that he too wanted the kid with a camera to capture his tour, the tour that elevated the Wailers from playing to a few dozen die-hard reggae fans into global stardom. Dennis Morris rose with them. His portraits of Marley have the same intimacy and ease as his portraits of neighbours.
There’s no barrier between the subject and the photographer; there is trust and friendship. There is also a very talented photographer. Whatever the subject or the circumstance of the photographs, they are dynamic and beautifully lit. His backstage shots of the Wailers’ tour that included their famously recorded gig at the Lyceum also includes the iconic shot of Marley that was the album cover art – Marley in ecstasy, all denim and Gibson guitar and flying locks, beautiful, energetic, timeless.
He went on to be photographer-of-choice for reggae stars, and to make an exceptional series of portraits of the Sex Pistols, backstage, onstage and on tour. John Lydon caught looking young and reflective, Sid Vicious never not sneering. They are again intimate and candid shots, not the heavily styled posing that most bands specialised in. Sid Vicious excepted, obviously. That said, the exhibition closes with a large set of highly posed publicity pics he made with punk and New Wave bands in the eighties, and they are memorable and artful, perhaps especially the cover of Marianne Faithfull’s Broken English album, blue-tinted with a neon cigarette end, but not very intimate.
Dennis Morris
Sid Vicious and Johnny Rotten, S.P.O.T.S tour, Coventry bus
station, UK, 1977
© Dennis Morris
The heart of the exhibition, however, is the sequences of community portraits, with an evident, easy connection between photographer and subject. It’s a lovely stylistic approach that extends to his higher profile portraits of reggae and punk stars, and especially the pictures of Bob Marley.
A record of history, a collection of iconic images, a glorious exhibition.
Runs until 28 September 2025