For a couple of years in the late 2000s, the photographer John Goto, who has died aged 74 of hypersensitivity pneumonitis, and his wife Celia, a psychoanalyst, posed for a series of images he titled West End Blues. Singly or together, they stood in profile in front of restaurants and theatres around Soho, London, in costumes dating from the end of the first world war to the end of the Vietnam conflict. Their figures were then Photoshopped out of the resulting photographs, leaving negative images like the ones silhouetted on walls by a nuclear blast.
Each photograph was named after a famous jazz musician – Louis Armstrong, Ken “Snakehips” Johnson, Adelaide Hall – who had come to play in London between 1919 and 1974. Most were black, many of them migrants. The 17 images in West End Blues were variously troublesome. In terms of genre, they seemed closest to street photography, and yet their subjects were posed rather than happened upon. The bleached-out Gotos were flat, the backgrounds behind them three-dimensional; the photographs affected to be archival, and yet were entirely contemporary. Worst of all, the images had been openly, joyously manipulated on a computer. When Goto turned his series into an augmented reality walking tour downloadable on a mobile phone, critics of a purist bent shuddered.
