“In the 1980s, Hackney was a very poor place,” says local photographer Neil Martinson, “but there were no food banks”
Tag: Hackney
Set up by photographic agency East in 2019, the Dalston space has shown work by rostered artists as well as third-party exhibitors. As Geeting’s The Marble opens this Friday, we find out more about the gallery and its ethos
All images © Francesca Allen Styling by Claire Lemaigre Shot over five summer months in…
31 March 2022
The London-based photographer walks us through her creative process, moving between her Tottenham studio space and the nature that surrounds it
“I began to see this huge web of support that was unfolding”
100 years, 100 stories: Jenny Lewis’ latest photobook on the Hackney community challenges prejudices
Beginning with a newborn and ending with a 100-year-old, Lewis captures a portrait of diversity and charm in the East London borough
Discovered in the basement of the Rio cinema in 2016, an archive of 12,000 images made by an initiative for unemployed people, provides a portrait of everyday life, shot from within the community
Shot over four years, Nelson’s new documentary hones in on a single street in Hackney, where 150-year-old eateries meet hipster coffee joints and £2m penthouse flats
Tom Hunter’s best-known shot shows a young woman in a squat reading a possession order; taken in Hunter’s home in the 1990s, the portrait’s colour and composition evoke Vermeer’s A Girl Reading At An Open Window. His new series, Figures in a Landscape, is a similar combination of personal and the cultural, which takes the viewer “through a world imbued with myths and legends”.
Starting in Dorset, in the village where Hunter grew up, the series tracks past standing stones and megalithic chalk figures in the countryside and the dinosaurs in London’s Crystal Palace park, and ends up in Hackney, Hunter’s base for the last 20 years, and once home to Lugus, the Celtic god of the River Lea. The last shot was taken at Winterville where, says Hunter “the mid-winter solstice pagan festival becomes distorted in an Olympian mountain top landscape. Here ancient and contemporary narratives clash and shatter into a dystopian consumerist nightmare”.
“I don’t have a journalistic bone in my body,” says Chris Dorley-Brown. “I’ve never been to Kosovo. Loads of people do that really well, but I don’t have the urge or the instinct, and that’s partly why I don’t really think of myself as a professional. I do the odd advertising job to earn money, and I think I do it okay, but the phone isn’t ringing off the hook with jobs because I don’t put the energy into promoting myself, since I’m wandering around here all the time. I keep my overheads low and can just about get away with it.” It’s a modest way to sum up an extraordinary body of work – more than 30 years of images, nearly all shot in London’s East End, and most photographed on the street. Some show luxury new developments, others rundown social housing. Some capture crowds of people, some empty streets. Many are one-offs, others – such as the images in The Corners – are manipulated using Photoshop to put various passersby together on one intersection