London

‘Gilbert the Shit and George the Cunt’ (1969), magazine sculpture
‘After this, no one could ever insult us again! It was a pre-emptive strike – we were asked to submit some work for publication, but instead of images we suggested a magazine sculpture. Studio International said they couldn’t publish it and censored it by putting black blocks over the words. Even the man who served us in the shop where we had the roll of film developed on Oxford Street gave us the prints and said, “Don’t come back”. We were doing something new every day at that time; we were trying to find ourselves. The world has changed, but the piece remains the same.’ Feature continues

‘Death’ (1976), from the ‘Red Morning Pictures’
‘England was on strike in 1976. There was one big mountain of shit – mostly dustbin bags – piled up in Trafalgar Square because they hadn’t collected the rubbish for months. Do you remember the super rats and super flies that were morphing into superior beings? Every continental person thought that Britain was wrecked forever and, although we never believed that, there was this end-of-the-world atmosphere as though some red cloud was coming to eat us up. It was quite threatening one night when we took some friends to the theatre and all the lights went out in the middle of the evening.’

‘Prostitute Poof’ (1977), from the ‘Dirty Words Pictures’
‘This work appears in that Woody Allen movie, “Manhattan”, but they positioned the camera in a clever way so as to remove the word “prostitute”. The “Dirty Words Pictures” were a big breakthrough for us because we began to include other people for the first time. We took these photos in the streets, or surreptitiously from a window, during the Notting Hill Carnival. At that time, if you had a camera, you had to take your pictures and run because it was very rough and they were out to steal.’

‘Boot’ (1989), from the ‘Cosmological Pictures’
‘This is an unusual work. It is a reflection of us and some London plane trees in a puddle, but there are also real leaves and seeds in there too. The boot divides the image in two; we wanted to have man in place of nature, the leg instead of a tree trunk.

‘Young people love boots, never more so than in the ’80s with Dr Martens. You would see these aggressive-looking punks walking down Brick Lane from that shop Blackmans in Cheshire Street and think you should cross the road. But they were just fancy French tourists. The boot is interesting because it was so politicised and then the lefties and the goth girls took it on. Similarly, there are no skinheads any more and nobody shouts “baldie” at me from buses either, because most builders have shaven heads nowadays.’

‘Flat Man’ (1991), from the ‘New Democratic Pictures’
‘We became fascinated by these brutalist flats in 1991 and took hundreds of photos of them – these ones are on Montague Street, but we livened them up and made them a bit more colourful. Now the tower blocks are all gone or are being demolished. They blow them up and people who lived in them come back to cheer and clap. The idea behind the “New Democratic Pictures” was to make a cosmology that showed we are part of everything, of every leaf, every building and every street.’