Anna Coatman

1 month ago | artreview.com | Anna Coatman

In Lives Less Ordinary, a diverse portrait of working-class life offers welcome respite from the patronising photographs of Martin ParrTwo boys with dirty knees and linked arms gambol down a Glasgow street, both looking directly into the camera. The English photojournalist Bert Hardy took this grainy black-and-white photograph of a postwar urban scene, titled Children of the Gorbals (Gorbal Boys), as part of an assignment for the Picture Post in 1948.

Oct 18, 2024 | frieze.com | Anna Coatman

Helen Charman is worried about her mother’s knees. They are ‘ruined’ – partly from bearing two children, but also from decades of working as a physiotherapist for the NHS, supplemented by cleaning jobs. (‘Pregnancy, like cleaning, fucks up your knees.’) Being a single parent employed in an undervalued caring profession meant a triple shift – with a triple strain on her cartilage.