When he was demobbed from the US army in the mid-60s, the photographer John Benton-Harris settled in London, working for the swinging, short-lived magazine London Life. Steeped in the New York street photography of Robert Frank and Garry Winogrand, he viewed the English with an amused outsider’s eye. He was fond of a quotation from Winston Churchill: “You must not underrate England. She is a curious country and few foreigners can understand her mind.”
That curiosity was rarely better on display than at the Chelsea flower show. When he visited in 1974, Benton-Harris was far more interested in the rare specimens on the picnic grounds at the Royal Hospital than those in the gardening competition. The display in this picture reveals perennial qualities of the English character, framed by awkwardness, somewhat clipped and stunted in emotional display.
It is, as always, a comedy of tiny nuances of class. While neither marriage appears to be in full, ecstatic bloom, the pair seated on the chairs guard a temporary advantage. The woman perched on the bank will forever be wondering about what best to do with her knees and whether the turban was a mistake. Her husband, meanwhile, appears to take quiet pride in the fact he would never be seen out with a checked sports coat and a fat cigar and would know to pour his wife’s cuppa before his own. The single man between them has seen it all before.
A new monograph of Benton-Harris’s photographs captures the changes of London society between the 1960s and the late 1980s, from free love to free markets. “Living among the English,” he suggested, “I sometimes feel that like my camera, I too am a time machine, being drawn to observe so many people pining to return to all their yesterdays.”
• Walking London 1965-1988 by John Benton-Harris is published by Café Royal Books
