Photographs from Fleet Street

London’s National Portrait Gallery has a new photographic exhibition starting on 5 July called Daily Encounters:Photographs from Fleet Street. Up until the mid-1980s Fleet Street, just to the west of St Paul’s Cathedral, was the centre of the national press in Britain with all the major national daily newspapers based there.

The National Portrait Gallery says the exhibition ‘will explore the pictorial depiction, through newspaper photography, of Britain and Britishness, the creation of new forms of celebrity, and the scripting and constant redrafting of the rules of engagement between photographers, editors and the subjects of their insatiable gaze. Newspaper photographs of politicians, jockeys, gangsters, models and actors will be interwoven with images of the industry itself; the owners and editors, newsrooms and printing presses, photographers and journalists as they hunted and gathered stories, both alone and in packs.’

The exhibition spans the eighty years of Fleet Street photography up to the relocation of the papers in the 1980s and shows how anyone with celebrity became the staple diet of newspaper photography and how all sections of society were covered. Daily Encounters is on from 5 July-21 October in the Porter Gallery, tickets cost £5. The National Portrait Gallery is on St Martin’s Place near Trafalgar Square and is open daily from 10am-6pm (9pm Thurs-Fri).