Colin Pantall on Ken Grant “No Pain Whatsoever”

‘This book is about the quiet hours and days, relationships that ebb and flow, flourish or fail, and what we do – and, sometimes, about all we can do.’ No Pain Whatsoever starts with a picture of the docks. Liverpool used to be a seafaring town, but here the sky is grey and dank, the water still, unmoving. There are cranes, ships and frayed ropes but nothing much seems to be moving, nothing seems to happening. Flip the page and the movement comes. A man holds a child on the ferry across the River Mersey to Birkenhead. His face is lined, his eyes look down. In the background a girl stands looking out at the river, a man stands stuck in thought.

 

This is a book of faces then, faces that stand out against the worn out landscapes that Grant photographs in. They are faces that are hard, thoughtful, worn-out, inquisitive, that beckon you into their world. The man with the metal frame around his face, the young Fernando Torres lookalike with the broken arm, the women leaning against what might be a beachfront wall.

Everybody has a history in the book and the history ties in to the places Grant photographs; New Brighton, the ferry, the docks, the pubs but most of all the streets. Liverpool is a city that looks and feels like no other. It’s run down yet at the same time grandiose. It has an edge to it but also has warmth, wit and charm like no other. It’s a working class city that wears its identity with pride. The docks might be gentrified, the city centre surrounded by a circle of dereliction (still) but it’s still an amazing place to visit and see. And that ambivalence comes out in Grant’s pictures. He’s a gentle man with a soft voice. Listen to him speak and he lulls you with a lovely line of Grantisms; an elegant, poetic world that flows like a very gentle stream in exactly the direction Grant wants to take you. But No Pain Whatsoever is not really that gentle. He shows the faces of matriarchs that have a an inner core that has suffered, survived and come out stronger, we see shopping centres and red-brick terraces that are decorated with litter and a sense of neglect and decay. And then there is the dereliction, the empty lots, the scavenging and the search for a living; these pictures (very quietly) also tell a story, a story of a city marginalised by government, a city stigmatised for its own identity, a place where men gather bits of iron together to scrape a living, where a dump provides a way to survive. That is where the book is strongest and where it goes beyond a collection of work, where the people and the place come together, where people inhabit urban landscapes of empty streets and shattered car parks in an almost lyrical manner, as though the concrete were grass and the terraced housing glades of trees and babbling brooks.