John Claridge, a photographer revered for his intimate portrayal of the East End of London where he grew up, has died aged 81.
At a funfair on Wanstead Flats, east London, in the mid-1950s, an eight-year-old Claridge saw a plastic camera and wanted it. He threw rings to win it but missed, leaving empty-handed. Yet that moment set his course toward a decades-long, multi-award-winning career in advertising photography.
Claridge worked for tourist boards of the Bahamas, India, England, and the US, and shot campaigns for Rolls-Royce, Porsche, Jack Daniels, Sony, and Wrangler. His work was honored at D&AD awards and the One Show in New York. He authored some 50 books, mostly self-published, and his photographs are held in collections worldwide, including the V&A, the National Portrait Gallery, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Despite his success, it is his warm, black-and-white portrayal of his own London neighborhood, shot in the 1960s and 70s and gathered in the 2016 monograph East End, for which he is most revered.
As a teenager, Claridge saved up and bought an Ilford Sportsman camera on hire-purchase to capture the wonder on his doorstep. He gravitated to the Thames and the docks where his father worked, photographing from the shore or from a tiny inflatable dinghy at dawn. He taught himself to develop and print in the family's outside toilet. His fog-shrouded images echoed the paintings of JMW Turner.
At 15, he left school and went to a local labor exchange, saying he wanted to be a photographer. He was sent to the McCann Erickson advertising agency, where he got a job as an assistant in the photographic department. It was then that he turned his lens on his own community, photographing instinctively at weekends or any spare time.
His candid, atmospheric work captured the joys and travails of daily life in the East End. His portraits of shopkeepers, workers, and urchins are suffused with empathy. These images opened doors for him, leading to his first solo exhibition at the agency's gallery in 1961.
That same year, he visited Bill Brandt, giving him a print. Brandt invited him in and talked warmly about his work. Claridge later worked as an assistant to David Montgomery, honing his printing style and hanging out with contemporaries Brian Duffy and David Bailey. At 19, he opened his own studio near St Paul's Cathedral.
His success led to a house on the Essex coast and an E-type Jaguar, but after his marriage to Pauline Gallagher ended in divorce, he returned to London. He lived in a flat on Frith Street in Soho, above Ronnie Scott's jazz club, where he socialized with and photographed musicians like Chet Baker.
From 2004, for 15 years, Claridge shot around 800 portraits of Soho's denizens in a makeshift studio above the French House pub. Exhibitions of his work there included Faces of Soho in 2009.
In his later years, Claridge divided his time between London and a farmhouse in south-east France, which he renovated with his second wife, Janet. She survives him. John Edward Claridge, photographer, born 15 August 1944; died 24 May 2026.
