The beauty in the bleak: How photographer Mike Abrahams captured Liverpool

‘I look for humanity in pictures, and I feel that direct, emotional commitment to people that I photograph’

Dear readers — For the last five decades, Mike Abrahams has been working tirelessly to chronicle the ordinary. Armed with his camera in hand, the 72-year-old Liverpool-born photographer has shot images from Merseyside to London, Ireland to Africa, documenting the day to day lives of people across the world. In today’s edition, Abi speaks to Mike about his career so far, and how capturing the simplest of moments can create something remarkable. 

But first, your Post briefing — including criticism for the region’s MPs over the winter fuel allowance vote and a new speed limit for roads on the Wirral.

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Your Post briefing

Merseyside MPs have faced criticism for failing to oppose the cut to winter fuel allowance. From the region’s 16 MPs, 11 voted with the government’s cut and four abstained, with only West Derby representative Ian Byrne opposing the motion. Conspicuous by her absence was Riverside MP Kim Johnson, who cited a dental procedure as the reason she could not attend. Johnson also missed the vote for a ceasefire in Gaza last November. Most bizarrely, in July, after campaigning to end the highly contentious two-child benefit cap, Johnson voted with the government to keep the policy while praising those who voted to scrap it. By doing so, she kept the Labour whip – unlike Byrne, who now stands as an independent. 

Sefton Council will hold a meeting later today to address the impact of the 29th July Southport stabbings on the area. Elected representatives are expected to offer condolences to families of the victims, including Alice da Silva Aguiar, nine, Bebe King, six, and Elsie Dot Stancombe, seven, who all died at the knife attack at  Taylor Swift-themed dance class.

The controversial 20mph speed limit is expected to hit 600 more roads on the Wirral by 2025. The Wirral Council scheme, begun last year, has already converted 2,500 roads to 20mph zones. According to a new council report, the roll-out will be completed with the help of £300,000 in funds from the Liverpool City Region Combined Authority.

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By Abi Whistance 

Growing up in Allerton in the late 1950s, Mike Abrahams was fascinated by the bleakness of life. As a child, he remembers wandering through the streets of Liverpool, weaving in and out of the concrete exoskeletons of bombed-out buildings. At this time, the council had not yet begun its slum clearances, and the remains of post-war Liverpool hung heavy over the city. It was a dangerous playground for children. “What impressed me was the desolation in the city after the war,” he says. “Everything was black and falling to bits, and I was quite impressed by that sort of destruction and desolation.” 

Now 72 years old, Mike has travelled across the globe working as a freelance photographer, taking snapshots that capture the same brutality and bleakness that fascinated him as a child. From the Troubles in Northern Ireland to the aftermath of the riots in Toxteth, he’s found himself at the heart of communities recovering from cataclysmic events time and time again. Yet he didn’t wander into this career by chance. 

From a young age, Mike dreamed of being a photographer — a pipe dream, both he and his parents thought. After all, while he’d spent countless hours admiring the pages of Life magazine, the route into such a career felt impossible. “How do you, as a young kid in Liverpool, work for Life magazine?” he laughs. “It was like wanting to be a pop star, as far as I was concerned.”

While his parents indulged him in his hobby — buying him his first camera at age 15 — they pushed him to become a doctor. As a Jewish family, it was important that their child had a “real career” and a vital role in society. “There was always a fear that we would be moving again somewhere else,” Mike explains, the atrocities of the Holocaust still fresh in the minds of his parents. “I suppose in their eyes, you could always work as a doctor. You'd always survive as a doctor.”

A Primary Health Care Team operating from the Earle Rd medical centre, Liverpool, 1998. Photo: Mike Abrahams

By age 19, Mike was juggling work for the ambulance service in Liverpool with studying medicine at university. In the back of ambulances, he travelled to previously unexplored parts of north Liverpool — an area rife with poverty, unlike the neighbourhoods he grew up in. He recalls one house he visited several times, inhabited by a sickly elderly couple. “They had no electricity and still had a gaslight,” he says. “They had this arrangement over a fire where they cooked in the living room. I couldn't believe that, yet they were really quite dignified.”

His stint in medicine only lasted a year — to his parents’ dismay, Mike was kicked off his degree. He absconded to study photography in London soon after, but the humble livelihoods he saw while working for the ambulance service impacted the images he went on to take throughout his career. 

When he began working for newspapers and magazines in the 70s, Mike sought to wander in and out of people’s lives with his camera, capturing them as is. The intimacy of photographing the ordinary makes each image feel remarkable in its own right. 

The pictures he took during the Toxteth riots in 1981 serve as perhaps the best example of this. While Mike himself admits his strong suit wasn’t capturing the conflict itself (“I wasn't really good at night photography and using a flash was drawing a bit too much attention to myself”, he tells me), he came into his own on the streets of Granby in the hours after the violence.