In March, I had two photo books published by Café Royal Books: The Velvet Underground, New York 1965–66 and Play Space, North Kensington 1967–1969.

Craig and his family who run the publishing house print weekly books of photographers’ work. They are all 36 pages, A4 folded and stapled, nicely printed on acid-free paper, and cost only £7 each. Many of them are street documentaries of towns and cities, and others feature various communities and pockets of culture especially in Britain and Ireland with some in New York and beyond.

Since they began in 2005, they’ve published more than 700 books which have been collected by MoMA NY, Tate, Cambridge University, and more. Café Royal prints 300 copies, gives 50 to the photographer, no money changes hands. I love the whole thing. Together, the books all make an incredible social history of Britain. I’ve bought about 45 different ones because they are fantastic.

Imagine doing 700 books, on acid free paper, using his local printer, sold cheap, over one a week for 12 years, mostly from photographers’ unpublished work, otherwise dusty and forgotten — it is a monumental achievement. I’m fortunate to have two of my works among that number, on sale now.

Earlier this year, I resurfaced my photos of kids playing in North Kensington during the summers of 1967-1969. The Greater London Council had just demolished 700 houses across North Kensington to build the longest elevated motorway in Europe, and a child in South Kensington had 10 times more public open space than a child in North Kensington. (You can read more in the new Westway section of my website here.)

We opened 8 temporary playgrounds in the north in the summers of 1967-1969 when the need was critical. In the act of adding my photos from that time to my website, I fell in love with them all over again. (You can view the photo gallery here.)

The photos have come together in an exhibition running from 21st November – 21st December 2023 at 3 Thorpe Close.

General admission is free, and you can reserve a spot on the Eventbrite page below.

You can read more about the exhibition on the Westway Trust’s website, including the description of the event reposted below:

Launch of local photographer Adam Ritchie’s ‘Playspace 67-69’ exhibition

‘Playspace 67-69’ — an exhibition of photography by Adam Ritchie

About this event

This exhibition focuses on Adam’s photography documenting pioneering Summer Play Programmes that took place in North Kensington from 1967-69. Documenting intangible culture in this unique patch of London, it presents joyous, poetic and exuberant images of kids, freed to have fun, captured at sites of a Summer Play Programme that local people set up and ran on 12 sites with the help of 200 invited students, who were housed and fed in a disused school.

In experiencing these images, there is a bittersweet irony. This was the very era in which the cultural melting pot of North Kensington saw marginalised and minority groups support each other in resisting racism and many other forms of open prejudice and neglect. It was also simultaneously a hub for extreme creativity offering new social models.

This broader political landscape may not be manifest in many photos included in the exhibition, but it hovers like a spectre at the edges of all of the images. The groundbreaking Summer Play Programmes were partly a response to the harsh reality that many local parents could not afford to take time off work: summer school holidays were a childcare challenge. Thus, the exhibition is at once celebratory, but simultaneously a reminder of social realities experienced by economically excluded communities, perhaps all the more timely in our current landscape of a return of a cost of living crisis and erosion of social provision.

Francis Whately interviewed me for the second part of his three part programme Andy Warhol’s America (2022). The series documents major events in the 20th century through the perspective of Warhol’s life and work. I’m featured in the episode “The American Nightmare.”

The BBC wrote: “The second episode charts Andy Warhol’s response to the Civil Rights movement and the assassination of John F. Kennedy, as well as other major historical events happening in America in the 60s. We hear stories about Warhol setting up the Silver Factory and managing The Velvet Underground, and also how he faced his own personal nightmare; he was shot by a Factory associate.”

And the Daily Telegraph wrote: “Francis Whately, he of the outstanding Bowie trilogy of documentaries, turns to an acquaintance of The Dame for this no-less-compelling new three-parter examining the life and times of the pioneering and endlessly divisive artist and provocateur. Beginning with his early years, its contributors include Bianca Jagger, Bob Colacello and Penny Arcade.”

The legendary Todd Haynes’ film The Velvet Underground (2021) has 47 of my photos in it. Time Out said: “If you already love the Velvet Underground, this is two hours of visual and aural bliss. If you don’t, same.”

Here’s what some other publications wrote:

BBC Culture: “Haynes’ film doesn’t try to explain The Velvet Underground to us, but does its utmost to put us in the room with them, mirroring their jaggedly cool style with fragments of archival footage and the constant rumble of their musical catalogue. As he tells BBC Culture, ‘My job as a filmmaker is to try to bring the medium of film, in some context, to open up the visual language of a movie to a band and their music. It’s really about “how do you make a feeling of watching the movie something on a par with what they did?”‘”

The Guardian: “Haynes gives a very good sense of what I can only call the transcendental quality of the Velvet Underground’s music, inspired as it initially was by the aesthetic of drones, sustained chords and chord variations, a sense that continuous immersion in the music will (at some stage) facilitate an epiphany that cannot be coerced or guaranteed.”

The New Yorker: “If there’s a band from the nineteen-sixties that deserves the label ‘legendary,’ it’s the Velvet Underground; if there’s a director working today who knows what most becomes a legend, it’s Todd Haynes. Somehow the unpredictable excitement, and sometimes almost unendurable boredom, of the Velvet Underground eludes Haynes—but perhaps that should not surprise us. As the film’s most delightful talking head, Jonathan Richman of the Modern Lovers, puts it, ‘You could watch them play, and there would be overtones that you couldn’t account for. You could see [plays a rhythm-guitar riff]. Then you’d hear a lead, a fuzz lead, over that. And you’d hear the bass line. But there’d be these other sounds in the room. . . . It was this group sound.'”

The New York Times: “‘The kinds of subjects I want to make films about are not just because it’s music I love,” Haynes said. “They’re about cultural moments where the artist, or the genre of music, changes things or reflects changes in the culture. Or they set up an example of a unique — and usually in my mind radical — experiment where the artist succeeds in playing around with notions of identity through music and through performance.'”

Chuck Smith’s documentary Barbara Rubin and the Exploding NY Underground (2018) includes 16 of my photos and an interview with me.

As summarized on IMDb, “Life-long friend Jonas Mekas saved all her letters, creating a rich archive that film-maker Chuck Smith carefully sculpts into this fascinating portrait of a nearly forgotten artist. An avant-garde maverick, a rebel in a man’s world, Barbara Rubin regains her rightful place in film history.”

Here’s some more words about the film from a few publications:

Variety: “With incisive and enthusiastic commentary from everyone involved, “Barbara Rubin and the Exploding New York Underground” recounts its story with infectious energy, and uses overlapping color-coded imagery that conjures the spirit of a Zelig-like figure whose contributions to the counterculture were, the director persuasively argues, invaluable.”

New York Times: “Featuring reminiscences and observations from a wide range of friends and critics (one of these interviewees, Amy Taubin, is both), the documentary sketches Rubin’s alliances with the likes of Bob Dylan, Andy Warhol, the Velvet Underground and Allen Ginsberg. Because, frustratingly, there appears to be no extant footage of Rubin being interviewed, the talking heads serve as docents through a life that has many corners of obscurity.”

Hollywood Reporter: “For most viewers, even those well-versed in ’60s culture, her identity is a mystery. But Rubin, it turns out, was no shadowy background player. During the brief years that she was part of downtown New York’s avant-garde, she was a fearless creator and a life-changing catalyst. More than one person interviewed for the documentary describes her as angelic, and the late Jonas Mekas, her mentor and dear friend, compares her to Rimbaud, making her subversive mark and then disappearing ‘into the sands of some spiritual Africa.’”