Administrative/Biographical History

Statement by Moyra Peralta:

"I WAS a street photographer. Always in my life there had been images, and so many connected to loss. At some stage in transition, whilst shedding diverse roles, I became a photographer. Through sheer bloody stubbornness I made this label fit. The role mysteriously anchored me into my new chosen world: it was passport, exit, and visa.

It opened, not doors, but avenues of approach. Waving my singular passport, for 30 years I picked up strangers… babies, dogs, and old ladies… unique and wonderful madmen… derelicts, poets, saints, and sinners. I skirted purposefully round other people’s lives, then, when friendship offered, shamelessly tumbled into them.

The occupants of my city, with the visual diversity of their mostly-hidden lives, suddenly become my "rare and significant others". I became participant-observer in my own life - each day a different happening, filling me with wonderment, or anger, gratitude, love, or fear.

Amazing people surfaced daily on every street corner to enrich my life, to deepen my perceptions, to teach me meaning, and I was encouraged to disentangle from my thin, frayed, familiar safety-lines. My occupational knowledge stemmed from empathy, close relative to photography. I used to say "I hear things through my eyes…"

I wanted my photographs to rescue people, in a visual sense, from oblivion; expose them (in the best possible sense) and acknowledge and celebrate their difficult lives. I have always felt, buried in my bones, that it was important to document the lives and conditions of those living on our city streets. Over the decades, this brought me in touch with a great many extraordinary people, of all ages and backgrounds, whom it has been a rare privilege and joy to know.

Scope and Content

c200 black and white photographs by Moyra Peralta detailing street life and homelessness in Central London, Spitalfields and the Waterloo Bullring, 1973-2000.

To view the images in the Moyra Peralta Archive on the Online Catalogue, click here: https://bit.ly/355C5I0.

Quantity

200 tiff and jpg files

Discover more photography held in our collections