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Café Royal Books

Stills, Edinburgh

Five stars

 

Over the last decade, Craig Atkinson’s Café Royal imprint has become one of the most vital platforms for documentary photography in the UK. Since 2012, an array of artists have utilised Café Royal’s punky A5 zine-like format across some 600 editions and rising to produce a street-smart archive of a population at work, rest and play. These have ranged from short form photo essays by well-known artists including Martin Parr and Syd Shelton, to less familiar but just as vital fly on the wall witnesses to a pre digital, pre gentrified age.

 

All life is here, be it on red brick streets, in back street boozers and social clubs, out of season seaside towns and 1990s raves. Middle-aged matriarchs scream in close up at 1980s wrestling. Ballardian breezeblock monoliths reach for the sky in what we used to call concrete jungles. 

 

This exhibition consolidates Atkinson’s tireless vision in collecting and curating the vast swathes of material on show. The front gallery sees every wall plastered from top to bottom with seventy poster size images culled from Café Royal’s back catalogue. Blown up in this way, pictures of reggae sound systems, carnivals, solitary drinkers and kids posing on the bonnets of burnt out cars resemble stills from some long lost 1970s Play for Today.

 

The back room lines up a copy of all 600 pamphlets in order of release, allowing viewers to flick through their contents as one might in their local library, if it’s still open. While some editions take in the sights of a dilapidated New York or Mexico, most stay local in what poet John Cooper Clarke, whose distinctive image features here, once dubbed a sociologist’s paradise.

 

Work close to home sees Glasgow in the 1970s and 1980s a favoured focus of Virginia Turbett, Peter Degnan and Hugh Hood, while John Walmsley captures the life and soul of Wester Hailes 1979. Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert takes a look at Longannet Colliery 2001, David Levenson zooms in on The Burry Man ritual, and Douglas Corrance takes a broader look at Scotland from the 1960s to the 1980s.

 

As an ongoing body of work, Café Royal Books becomes an ever-expanding collection of short stories that make up a much bigger picture of a world in motion, much of which no longer exists. The noise and smoky breath, poverty and pride contained within its pages become collective acts of accidental immortality, captured in a riot of living history.    

 

Stills, Edinburgh until 10th February 2024

 

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