c. 1975

Signed, titled and inscribed on the reverse:

"From London Street Musicians

Also: Photographs from Spitalfields
Ginger, Cheshire Street

Marketa Luskacova

Printed by me
Vintage Print"


This photograph is from a series of pictures taken in Spitalfields and also became the cover image of Luskacova's recent book on street musicians called To Remember. London Street Musicians 1975 - 1990 (2016).

In the book she explains: "The first street musician I ever met was at the horse fair in the West of Ireland on a cold autumn day in 1973 - an old man playing a violin between the horses. It was like an epiphany... A few years later I started to live in London close to Portobello Road Market. Street musicians played there frequently and the feeling of being in the presence of something precious stayed with me. The street musicians themselves were often quite lonely men, yet their music lessened the loneliness of the street, the people in it and my own loneliness."

Responding to the work John Berger wrote:

"it takes me back eighty years to my childhood (in the 1930's), when I was disturbed and spellbound by the street-musicians I passed and stopped to listen to and watch. The word play had a double-sense for me. They played instruments or they sang in the street in the hope of getting money, survival money, from the passers-by. And I played games in order to escape and feel that I was elsewhere."