Shirley Baker was born in 1932 in a town in England called Salford. She lived in England from birth until 2014, when she died. Throughout the 1960s and the 1970s, Baker took pictures of things she saw in the inner-city slums of Manchester. Her images were never posed; she just waited until the perfect moment to take a photograph. Baker’s photographs are usually taken on the streets of Manchester, where the streets are rugged and destroyed.

The image I chose to focus on strangely is unnamed and almost untraceable. It appears on a British gallery website that sells Shirley Bakers photographs. In the photo the clear studium is a boy standing upright by a street corner with his friend bent over the side of the building corner. When I first looked at the photo I noticed that the first boy I mentioned has a bandage wrapped around his left knee. To me, this is the punctum. Seeing that he is still immaculately dressed made me question if this is a new injury or had it happened a few days prior? He did not seem to have any other injuries. However, after seeing the possibility of a quarrel having occurred, I looked around the photograph more for some clues to help me figure out the image. The blond child that is hiding behind the wall is wearing glasses, however it appears that they are crooked and one of the lenses is popped out. Were these boys in a fight with each other? Are they friends? Are they brothers? By the smirk on the first child’s face it seems like they are just having playful fun. Additionally, I noticed a third, and final punctum, the object in the boys hands. To me, it looks like a wireless remote controller. Although this unnamed photo also doesn’t have a date attached to it, referring to context clues from other pictures that Shirley Baker took, it is unlikely that that is a game controller, because they were not circulated until the 1990s, and Baker’s oeuvre was taken up until the 1980s. It is something to note that perhaps the fact that the child is very well dressed, especially for a toddler, tells us that he is from a rich family and could afford these new games to play with.

No matter what the circumstances were, this photo intrigued me and livened me up, just like Barthes says a photograph is supposed to do. Shirley Baker photography will forever hold a place in my heart.