East End Review

Tag: Photography

Unsterile Clinic: silhouettes of FGM survivors

Aida Silvestri, Type II B: Distance. From Unsterile Clinic, 2016

Female genital mutilation (FGM) is the focus of Aida Silvestri’s new photography exhibition in Shoreditch.

The practice, in which parts of a girl’s genitalia are cut off for non-medical reasons, often in the belief that it will control their sexuality, is still taboo in many parts of the world and frequently ignored by the media.

“I had another project about migration that had lots of coverage in the arts world. But when it comes to this [FGM], they don’t want to know.

“People are not comfortable looking at FGM images. Some say they are a little bit too harsh, but that is just an excuse. We need to be bold if we want to raise awareness,” said Ms Silvestri.

In the midst of Shoreditch’s Friday evening revellers, six women from the fields of art, health and advocacy met at Autograph ABP gallery to discuss ongoing efforts to eradicate FGM.

The panel, which attracted a 50-strong audience, was part of Silvestri’s Unsterile Clinic exhibition, a collection of photographs inspired by the artist’s personal experience.

Her silhouettes of FGM survivors feature layers of hand-stitched leather showing the type of mutilation they suffered.

Each portrait is accompanied by a poem, with the words edited from the subject’s own, moving story.

Aida Silvestri, Type II F. From Unsterile Clinic, 2015

In an interview prior to the panel, Silvestri, who was born in Eritrea but now lives and works in London, said that knowledge of FGM has improved in the UK.

She said: “I had my first child in 2011 and nobody knew about FGM. Even though some [health workers] should have been aware, nobody said anything to me.

“And then, with my second pregnancy, I was asked if I had undergone FGM. I said I had, and was then sent to be checked.

“So the awareness has greatly changed, and health centres and specialist clinics dealing with FGM are doing a lot of work to raise that awareness.”

However, Silvestri still encounters a lot of “ignorance” from people regarding her work.

She recalled a lady at a summer festival last year, who, when confronted with her art, said: “This isn’t our problem, this is the migrant’s problem. This is a Muslim problem. We Christians wouldn’t do that.”

The experience showed Silvestri, who is Christian herself, that people still don’t understand how widespread FGM is.

It is practised around the world, including in Africa, South America, the Middle East and the Far East, by communities of various races, religions and traditions.

“It is everybody’s problem,” Silvestri explained.

But she admitted that the subject matter had made it difficult to attract attention from mainstream media.

Education, the artist argues, is the way forward.

“I think we need to educate more people, and it has to start in school. The government has now included FGM as part of its safeguarding, so everyone has to know about it.

“During an Equality and Diversity workshop that I have attended recently, it was discussed that Ofsted apparently downgraded one school because the dinner lady didn’t know what FGM meant, which is really good, but we need to do more.

“More than prosecutions, we need education and support.”

Silvestri is planning more events to get people talking about FGM: “I’ve started a fight and I won’t stop.” And she is calling on councils to engage with locals and do more to teach youngsters about the practice.

It was a view echoed by her fellow panellists later in the evening.

Many issues surrounding FGM were raised during the three-hour debate: the patriarchal society within practising communities. The fact that FGM is an economically lucrative crime. The lack of clear guidelines for treating victims. The dearth of follow-up services, both psychological and physical, in the NHS.

But one message in particular rang out loud and clear: that the key to ending FGM is educating children and practising communities about its effects, as well as providing better training for teachers and health workers.

Deqa Dirie, health advocate and anti-FGM campaigner, said: “I’m not bashing anyone, but I know women who have been severely damaged by health professionals in the UK.”

She called for more follow-up services for survivors in the NHS and said nurses and midwives need to be better equipped to deal with survivors.

Emma Boyd, a senior producer at Animage Films, explained how the company works with UK charity FORWARD to produce short films for its FGM campaign.

Boyd said they were focused on getting their message into primary schools. She introduced an animation called The True Story of Ghati and Rhobi, which is played to children across Tanzania to raise awareness of FGM. FORWARD is hoping to adapt the film into a variety of languages.

Dianna Nammi, who founded the Iranian and Kurdish Women’s Rights Organisation (IKWRO), agreed that “talking to communities stops people doing it [FGM].”

IKWRO has launched the Right to Know campaign, which aims to get honour-based violence, including FGM, on the national curriculum in the UK.

Hoda Ali, a nurse and trustee of the 28toomany charity, spoke passionately about the merits of education.

Ali survived Type 3 FGM, which involves sealing the vagina until only a very small opening remains, and said it “took away her chances of being a mother.”

She was constantly in hospital from the age of 11 because her injuries meant her periods accumulated in her uterus. She was 17 years old when she had her first period.

She said: “My nieces are eight and eleven, and they’re at the back tonight because they’re not too young to listen. And they will go into school and educate their teachers.”

Ali also called for Silvestri’s work to be used at clinics, so women who have difficulty communicating with health workers can point out what type of FGM they have.

There was controversy when a teacher in the audience asked whether compulsory medical examinations at schools should be reintroduced so cases of FGM are caught early.

Hilary Burrage, author and chair of the debate, initially agreed, but her fellow panellists rejected the argument out of hand, saying it would do nothing to prevent FGM.

A suggestion was raised that midwives should be trained to explain to mothers, before they leave the hospital after giving birth, the law regarding FGM and its impact on victims. Again, the emphasis was on training and education.

The experts agreed that no amount of prosecutions or early diagnoses will end FGM: only when people are taught about the consequences of the practice will it stop.

Aissa Edon, a specialist midwife at The Hope Clinic and a survivor of FGM, described the moment she confronted her family: “I sat my father down, and I didn’t accuse him of child abuse. I explained to him the consequences that I have to live with every day,” she said.

“My father cried and simply said, ‘I didn’t know.’ And then he promised that no more of the girls in our family would ever be forced to suffer as I did.”

Unsterile Clinic
8 July – 17 September 2016
Autograph ABP
Rivington Place (off Rivington Street)
London
EC2A 3BA

July 26, 2016
Sonya Hurtado: capturing the innocence and cruelty of fairytales

Pigments of the imagination: ‘Red Riding Hood’ by Sonya Hurtado

Tales that are passed down through word of mouth evolve according to the whims and mores of society.

And so fables such as Little Red Riding Hood and Jack and the Beanstalk have over time become sanitised, the safe fantasy world they inhabit taking precedence over the stories’ more macabre elements.

It is this duality that that Hackney-based artist Sonya Hurtado tries to capture in a new exhibition of her work at the Museum of Childhood.

Tales is a series of 12 photographs that re-creates the imaginary world of childhood, drawing inspiration from surrealism, film and graffiti.

Pasturised: ‘Tale of the Milk Lady’ (el cuento de la lechera) by Sonya Hurtado

At first the images seem like paintings. In Red Riding Hood, a girl with a flowing red hood stands aloof in a field, whilst Tale of the Milk Lady sees a river of spilt milk propel forward, smashing a window.

“Behind a fairytales is always a dark message,” Hurtado says. “A lot of these messages were not so hidden but have become camouflaged to be nicer for the kids and not so scary.

“Take Jack and the Beanstalk. In reality Jack goes to the giant’s house and at the ends kills him, so in that story we admire and cheer on someone who is actually quite cruel.”

The unusual appearance of photographs is due to digital manipulation, with the artist playing with shadow, light and colour to convey a borderline sinister atmosphere.

Follow the leader: ‘The Pied Piper’ by Sonya Hurtado

The photographs deal with themes such as how children can struggle to come to terms with complex emotions such as loneliness and fear.

“We can’t always protect our children but we can help them to interpret their experiences in a way that helps them learn step by step to understand themselves and life,” she explains.

Hurtado was born in Spain and moved to London in 1998, where she discovered a love of photography during a course at Hackney Community College.

After graduating in 2013, she began developing an almost painterly technique using digital layering to create atmospheric scenes of childhood angst.

“I try to put myself in the kids’ shoes and imagine an imaginary world. A lot of kids look at the pictures and recognize the story but adults can look at them and see something else.”

Tales: Photography by Sonya Hurtado
Until 8 January 2017
V&A Museum of Childhood, Cambridge Heath Road, E2 9PA

On the lookout: ‘Alice in Wonderland’ by Sonya Hurtado

July 22, 2016
Post-war poignancy: a photographic elegy to 1960s East End

London docks, 1964. Photograph: John Claridge

East End is a stylish collection of more than 200 black and white photographs that captures all the grit and poverty of post-war East London and turns it into an elegy for a lost world.

Plaistow-born John Claridge, one of the most prolific photographers of the 1960s, had a typical East End childhood, playing in bombsites, boxing and falling asleep to the sounds and lights of the nearby docks.

Claridge knew he wanted to take photographs after seeing a camera at a funfair and took photos everywhere he went – whether it was the docks with his father or the shops on a Saturday with his mother, developing the photos in their outside toilet. The result is an intimate look at the East End through the eyes of one of its own.

Outside the Anglo Pak Muslim Butchers in 1962. Photograph: John Claridge

The photographs are a glimpse into an East End that is no more. In one picture a horse stands in a field framed by the Truman Brewery in the background, the chimney standing tall in a sky that has no skyscrapers. Others show shops with hand painted signs and broken windows, and a cobbler in his workshop.

The book progresses to show a changing East End. There are building sites and older faces, graffiti on a metal walkway and hollowed out factories, signifying the end of Claridge’s work in the area. As he mentions in the book’s introduction: “My East End was gone…I never expected it to go and then all of a sudden it was gone.”

The photographs rarely show any indication of a specific place such as a street sign – yet it is so distinctly the East End. From misty views of the Thames at dawn to close up portraits of boxers, the location is constantly signposted by the photographer’s familiarity and warmth to his subjects.

East End begins and ends with photographs of London’s docks and wharves, cementing the connection between Claridge’s childhood experiences there and his career: “I used to get up with my dad before he went down the docks…I really wanted to go to sea and see the world, but I did it through people sending me around the world to take photographs.”

East End by John Claridge is published by Spitalfields Life Books. RRP: £25.00. ISBN: 9780957656994

Mr and Mrs Jones, 1968. Photograph: John Claridge

July 19, 2016
London Life – book review: a wonderful photographic celebration of the city

Touch of frost: Regent’s Canal freezes over. Photograph: Colin O’Brien

Photographer Colin O’Brien’s book London Life may appear at first glance a series of beautiful yet somewhat random photographs, but is in fact a narrative of London and his own life.

The book begins in Little Italy, Clerkenwell, where O’Brien grew up. The early photographs are box camera negatives that O’Brien came upon by chance when clearing out his house. Looking at a photograph of two friends leaning against a car in Hatton Gardens in 1948, O’Brien says: “I love the way they’re posing. They were Italian, very confident and very cheeky.”

O’Brien’s early photographs show an interesting contrast of tenderness and violence. On one page, a girl is being taken to a birthday party in her new dress on Clerkenwell Road; on another, we see a car accident on the junction of the very same road.

There is a sense of loss in O’Brien’s photographs. He says: “I took lots of pictures of ‘last things’: the last tram, the last trolley bus, the last day of Woolworths, the last day of smoking in parks.”

Horse and cart in Hackney

Looking at pictures of Westminster Bridge and Trafalgar Square in 1954, O’Brien notices that even the light has changed. The air back then was dirty: “I remember going to the cinema and getting our money back because we couldn’t see the screen.”

It is not just the faces that are changing, but also the very nature of photography in the city. In the first half of the book, the photographs seem lonelier, the city more vast. In the 70s, however, the photographs are more populated with people and cars.

Flattened: High-rise flats are demolished at Hackney Downs. Photograph: Colin O’Brien

Every photograph has its own personal story. O’Brien turns to a photograph of Jim’s Café, on Chatsworth Road, taken in 2008. The proprietor is standing in the doorway.

“I took his picture, went back a month later with the pictures and his wife started crying and said he died last week. I said do you want the pictures and she said if she wanted them, she’d get in touch. She never got back.”

London Life is a wonderful celebration of the city, of people together and of tragedy. “I just take what’s in front of me,” O’Brien says, and it is this openness to experience that has taken O’Brien from the Victorian dwellings of his youth, and made him the London photographer that we know today.

London Life is published by Spitalfields Life. RRP: £25.00. ISBN: 9780957656956.

July 8, 2016
Get The Picture: George Blacklock and Gary Oldman, Flowers Gallery

George Blacklock, Detail from Pieta XI, 2006, oil on canvas, 153 x 122 cm (c) George Blacklock, Courtesy of Flowers Gallery, London and New York

Slipping Glimpsers is the admirably titled joint exhibition by Dean of Chelsea College of Art George Blacklock and the filmmaker and photographer Gary Oldman.

Said title is a nod to Expressionist painter Willem De Kooning and refers to a process of continually observing one’s own thoughts and sensations during the process of painting.

Intuitive observation and retrieval is the common thread linking the two artists, who became firm friends 30 years ago. They formed a band together and worked on the 1984 BBC film Honest, Decent and True.

In this two-man show, Oldman exhibits photography from film-sets whilst Blacklock displays paintings of densely populated pictorial spaces, filled with a sonorous quality.

George Blacklock, Pieta XI, 2006, oil on canvas, 153 x 122 cm (c) George Blacklock, Courtesy of Flowers Gallery, London and New York

Blacklock’s painting Pieta XI (2006) is a sensorial transcription of Michelangelo’s Pietà sculpture.

The painting transmits an unreservedly tactile, physical, and personal account of the internal psychological effect of the sculpture.

There is interplay between layers of varying material viscosities; Prussian blue with a yellow veil over a red ground accompanied by white accents.

The yellow sweeps over blue creating green to blue tones. Colours are encouraged to bleed, overspill and resurface as pentimenti.

Intertwined forms, colour and line are put into tension and dance as these forms fuse and evolve.

It is a ‘linguistic’ inventiveness reminiscent of the playful and visually plastic pictographic writing system of the Mayans.

Slipping Glimpsers
14 April – 14 May 2016
Flowers Gallery
82 Kingsland Road, E2 8DPz
flowersgallery.com

April 13, 2016
Strange and Familiar exposes Britain through outsiders’ lenses

Akihiko Okamura

Strange and Familiar is an epic exhibition about Britain, in which photographers from around the world and from down the years offer a fresh eye to the look and feel our idiosyncratic island.

Martin Parr, the British documentary photographer and photojournalist, has curated a show spanning from the 1930s to the present day, giving an outsider’s view of people and places that might otherwise feel familiar.

London and its citizens feature heavily, as might be expected, but so do the cities of the north, the mining villages of Wales, and some of the most isolated and intriguing corners of the British Isles.

Britain being one of the centres of culture in the world throughout the 20th century, the list of photographers who have placed it under their lens unsurprisingly corresponds to some of the biggest names in the history of the medium.

Giants like Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Frank are included here, but their work is placed alongside less well-known or more recently-lauded artists, informing and strengthening the impact of iconic images and often-imitated styles.

Edith Tudor Hart’s images, which appear alongside Cartier-Bresson’s, for example, offer a counterpart insight into 1930s Britain, seen through the eyes of an émigré Jewish woman. Her self-portrait with a random shopper in a market mirror was one of the first moments of stand-and-stare wonder in an exhibit of infinitely fascinating images.

As the exhibition moves forward through time, similar pairings evoke a sense of the feel of an era or moment. Robert Frank and Paul Strand’s 1950s explorations of London bankers, Welsh miners and the inhabitants of the Outer Hebrides acutely demonstrate the gulf in lives and society across the country at the time, and the difficulty of moving between them.

The importance of the changes in medium, and the technical advances that occur throughout the exhibition’s span are as equally present as the photographers. Noticing the shifting grain and quality of different artists’ preferred cameras and film stocks is a fascinating aspect of the experience of viewing so many images so closely together.

Key moments in photographers’ use of new technologies stand out, most vividly when Bruce Davidson’s mid-1960s photos of Welsh mining towns explode into hyper-real colour, the pink smoke staining the images of cobbled streets and grey stone houses. Frank Hablicht’s sexually charged images of the swinging 60s are playful and mobile, the camera peeking up and out to offer a flavour of the motion of the bright young things portrayed.

Raymond Depardon’s images of 1980s Glasgow contain some of the most striking uses of colour in the whole exhibition, the flames of burning rubbish glowing against a grimy background, or the harsh red of a car popping against slate grey housing. In the downstairs section of the gallery we are offered work that is further away from the conventions of portraiture, landscape and photojournalism, including the intricate scrapbooks of Shinro Ohtake, and Bruce Gilden’s contemporary extreme close-up grotesqueries.

The exhibition pans around the upstairs gallery and the ground floor corridor rooms, built around a central library space that gives visitors a wonderful opportunity to sit and leaf through the books that many of the photographs are drawn from. It’s an opportunity to handle the images, to inspect them in your hands rather than squint between shoulders at the wall. The break this offers may also be welcome, as the exhibition is enormous and warrants a leisurely visit to see it all.

Parr has created a huge and expansive survey of Britain, and done so in a way that might provide real insight into the funny place that many of us call home. Like the best survey exhibitions, different parts will appeal to different viewers, and you and I will each come away with our favourites and less-favourites. But more importantly this show is an excuse to wallow in beautiful documentary photography, in still images of everyday life and mundane strangeness, in the swim of history and the artistry of its documentation.

Strange and Familiar: Britain as Revealed by International Photographers
Until 19 June
Barbican Art Gallery
Silk Street, EC2Y 8DS
Facebook event

April 8, 2016
Mario Cravo Neto: A Serene Expectation of Light – review

© Laróyè, 1980-2000 © Instituto Mario Cravo Netto / Instituto Moreira Salles

A Serene Expectation of Light, on display at Rivington Place in Shoreditch, offers excerpts from two series of work by Brazilian photographer Mario Cravo Neto.

For over 30 years, before his death in 2009, Neto produced striking images that reflect the complex blend of cultures that give Brazil its unique identity.

The exhibition features the monochrome portraits of the Eternal Now series (produced in the 1980s and 90s) placed alongside Neto’s later colour snapshots of urban life in Salvador, Brazil’s first capital and a centre of immigration and diversity from the first European adventures into South America.

The Eternal Now series profiles aspects of the Candomblé religion that fascinated the artist. Candomblé emerges from the history of Salvador and Brazil, from the mixing of Yoruba, Bantu and Fon beliefs from West Africa with Roman Catholicism and indigenous South American beliefs.

Candomble’s worship of orixás, ancestral spirits imported by the transported peoples from modern Nigeria, Togo and Benin, still provides a rich spiritual and cultural basis for a system of belief and worship that Neto himself embraced during his life. His images here show posed worshippers, objects and animals for sacrifice and ritual moments fixed in black and white.

Neto’s images from this series reflect an almost obsessive focus on the minutiae of human bodies, fine wrinkles and liquid beaded on skin, texture and the interaction between objects and humans.

With Rooster. © Laróyè, 1980-2000 © Instituto Mario Cravo Netto / Instituto Moreira Salles

The studio set-up of these images appears informed by Neto’s earlier practice as an installation artist, the models carefully posed and the images framed for formal effect as much as the impact of their subjects. His images linger on the flick of a feather as a chicken is held, or the congruity of dappled patterning between a tortoise shell and the painted skin of a celebrant.

It is a shame that the installation in Rivington Place has not served these images particularly well, their black and white formality muddied by overly harsh lighting, and the resulting reflections from the heavy glass of the frames. The irritation of this unexpected problem spoils somewhat the first section of the exhibition. From a quick glance at the comments board, I can see that I was not the only visitor to find this frustrating.

Neto’s colour images though, which make up the second section of the exhibition, are well displayed in a double grid of bright squares. These images are still fleshy but more spontaneous, with traces of motion that are absent from the studio portraits of The Eternal Now series. In one of these vivid, less posed images a young woman floats partly submerged in a pool, her body made unfamiliar by the play of light on the water.

Neto’s colour is as stark as his black and white, whether the wet red of watermelon slices in the yellow sun or the deep blue pattern of the tiled street as boys play. Again, textures are the key visual element, an obsessive focus on the contours of surface and body, and the bleed between background and foreground that connotes a passing snapshot of daily life.

The interaction between the two series is well signposted, the exhibition feeling like a brief glimpse into a huge and impressive practice. It contains work by a fascinating artist, whose subjects and life were indivisibly linked.

A Serene Expectation of Light is at Rivington Place, EC2A 3BA until 2 April
autograph-abp.co.uk

March 11, 2016
Get the Picture: Cris Brodahl at The Approach gallery

Image courtesy of the artist and the Approach Gallery. Photograph: FXP Photography

Judging speculatively from her work, the Belgian artist Cris Brodahl must be a sensitive sort. Brodahl makes monochrome photorealist, film-noirish paintings of sensuous and brooding female forms, influenced by surrealism.

But her new series at Approach Gallery marks a departure for the artist, in the introduction of sculptural form. The passive female beauty taken from 1930s and 40s film is contrasted and paralleled with an active exploration of modernist sculpture. In the painting Lightyears (2015), from which the exhibition takes its name, collaging becomes the physical crack of a door opening slowly where the subject slowly emerges. The canvas is sized and mounted onto an aluminium-cut angled back, offering a blade-like edge.

There is a sense of a yearning here, a yearning to manifest some sort of identity, whether fiction or fantasy. Brodahl slows down time in the way she pauses on details, producing a quiet space away from contemporary visual cacophony.

These are paintings in which mystery is taking place, the different sections of the image, precisely cut like blades of shattered glass, introducing an interruption to the passage through the canvas. Stripped of excess, taking a closer look rewards the viewer by revealing subtle nuances of colour within the monochrome paintings. The way Brodahl’s works are arranged within the gallery is particularly well-considered. Some pieces are hidden from sight, gradually creeping into view after some absorbed observation. This is done through thin partitions and a table-height shelf, and the diagonal slats added to the window in the gallery, evocative of crisp white paper.

Lightyears by Cris Brodahl is at The Approach gallery, 47 Approach Road, E2 9LY until 27 March
theapproach.co.uk

March 10, 2016
Beside the Leaside

Photograph: Sam Napper

The still, murky waters of the Lee Navigation may provide a bucolic escape for some, though they are far from immune to the vicissitudes of city life.

Pollution has taken its toll on plants and wildlife, hulking new-builds cast shadows over the banks of the water, while boat dwellers on this 45km-stretch, running from Hertfordshire through East London to Limehouse Basin, are finding permanent moorings increasingly difficult to come by.

Photographer Sam Napper is trying to make permanent records of life on the Lee Navigation as it is now. His Leaside photography series goes on display this month at Leyas in Camden.

“It’s a wilderness in London and the other canals are not like that,” says the 29-year-old, a keen explorer of the canals who moved to East London five years ago.

“As you get further out of London the Lee Navigation becomes more rural, even though it’s still in London, whereas Regent’s Canal and the other ones are very urban spaces.”

After spending weeks on the towpath taking photographs, Napper developed a rapport with some of the people living on boats.
“A lot of the people I met were complaining about licences being removed, mooring spaces being privatised… a lot of people were upset but my slant is that it’s a way of life to be celebrated.

“One guy who moved there with his family has just celebrated his first year on the canal. He said to me that you know you can ‘do a canal’ when you’ve done a full season, because winter is so harsh.”

Napper’s photographs capture life on the canal in all its variety, from the joggers and plushy marshland to the bankside remains of Britain’s industrial past.

“It’s a real mix of people in there and I’m not coming from it just from the point of view of people on the canal boats. They’re a big part of the community but it’s just as important for people who want to use it for leisure,” Napper says.

A film and TV producer by day, Napper describes his photography style as “reportage” and observational.

“I really like finding a unique subject and trying to make it isolated and symmetrical so it feels like a whole new environment that no one’s ever seen before,” he says.

Leaside
Saturday 15 August
Leyas
20 Camden High Street
London
NW1

August 6, 2015
David Bailey: For Real review – ‘A palimpsest of post-war London life’

Photograph by David Bailey courtesy of Daniel Blau Munich/London

You can take David Bailey out of the East End, but you can’t take the East End out of David Bailey: in this new exhibition, even his portraits of elder Delhi men evoke the moustachioed hipsters of Kingsland Road.

Bailey: For Real at Daniel Blau London, one of three Bailey shows held internationally by the gallery in 2014, focuses on the more gritty, yet intimate aspects of his oeuvre: more like a carpenter’s sawdust than his recent glamorous National Portrait Gallery retrospective Stardust. “The East End personifies London for me – or, it did – because it was where I was brought up,” he once told the BBC. “I like change; I like the way it morphs into something else.”

Best known for his 1960s fashion photography, Bailey was born in Leytonstone in January 1938, into a rag-tag trade: the son of a tailor. His mother was born in Bow, his father in Hackney, his grandfather in Bethnal Green, and his genealogy from there – as far as records go – traces to Whitechapel. So, although his blossoming career took him around the globe, Bailey made frequent trips back to the East End.

The prints on show are certainly not an exclusive coup: Mick Jagger and his chiselled cheekbones make an appearance, alongside several portraits of Bailey’s famous friends, but we’ve seen it all before, and quite recently. What the exhibition does offer is a morphed, oblique perspective both on individual images, and the photographer’s work as a whole. Everything on show is presented on torn, imperfect pieces of glossy fibre photographic paper: each is uniquely frayed and shredded by Bailey’s own hands. It renders not only the tactile process of image-making more personal, but also cuts much of the familiar images we know: zooming in closely, it increases the proximity to and intensity of the subjects.

Bethnal Green (1961) depicts a young boy almost buckling under the weight of a crate of Charrington beer from the local brewery. East End (1961) is a complex shot of a pub window; an attractive barmaid pulls a pint, while lines of acid-etched words in the window contrast with an advertising hoarding message in the reflection. One image portrays a tattoo of the Kray twins – the notorious East London gangsters that befriended Bailey – itself based on an iconic portrait he once took of them. The exhibition also shows a bleak side of the capital’s east here. Children explore amongst masses of sacks strewn chaotically in one photograph, while another shows a dilapidated, ramshackle building on Viaduct Street, just a stone’s throw away from where Bethnal Green tube now is. Bailey himself was blown out of his home by the Luftwaffe.

These grainy rolls of aged black-and-white celluloid are reminiscent of George Brassai’s candid street photography in Paris. They are very much like relics, shown here in mounted boxes rather than frames, and are a palimpsest of post-war London life, as well as a few ventures abroad. However, while they do provide an interesting angle on Bailey’s work, the exhibition – in a year that has comprehensively surveyed the photographer – is relatively lightweight.

Bailey: For Real is at Daniel Blau Gallery, 51 Hoxton Square, N1 6PB until 28 June.

June 9, 2014