A nice cheerful one here for a summer’s day. Not really, this looks like a still from a Ken Loach film or a kitchen sink/scrapyard drama of a similar ilk; and is drawn from a new book entitled Benny Profane showcasing work by photographer Ken Grant. The images were all shot between 1989 and 1997 in Birkenhead, the dockland district on the River Mersey. and Grant was long familiar with the area having worked there as a labourer when he was young. Most of the images centre on the landfill site at Bidston Moss; where one man’s trash is quite literally another’s treasure. According to the book’s publisher RRB PhotoBooks, the title is drawn from a character in Thomas Pynchon’s novel V—“a man embarked on a precarious odyssey that takes him between goodness and profanity”—just as the subjects of Grant’s work seek stability amidst chaos and scarcity.
