East End Review

Category: PHOTOGRAPHY

Snap happy for Photomonth – UK’s largest photography festival returns

The Thames Estuary. Photograph: Simon Fowler. Part of After London at Cass Bank Gallery

As an area famously teeming with artists East London has always been an eminently suitable location for Photomonth. In October the UK’s largest photography festival returns, with some 100 galleries and art spaces opening their doors for free exhibitions, workshops and talks covering a colossal range of topics, from the Battle of Cable Street to homelessness and the refugee crisis. Here is our – by no means exhaustive – guide to the festivities ahead.

From Children of Vision series by Alina Kisina. Part of The Disinherited at The Print Space gallery

The Disinherited

Photomonth launches with The Disinherited, featuring specially commissioned work by three photographers. For her series Children of Vision, Alina Kisina took portraits of pupils at a special art school in Kiev for the blind and partially sighted to illustrate how creativity can transform lives. Heather McDonough’s Leave to Remain series is inspired by a period she spent volunteering in French refugee camps and her encounters not only with the people there but also with objects left lying spent and discarded. Big Red is Ed Thompson’s visual essay on homelessness, inspired by the story of a man who turned his back on London life in favour of a nomadic existence in his Big Red van.

Until 17 October, The Print Space Gallery, 74 Kingsland Road, E2 8DL
theprintspace.co.uk

Photographer Karen Harvey, set to feature in Girl Town at St Margaret’s House. Photograph: Karen Harvey

Girl Town

Celebrating the “culture of the female” in the 21st century, Girl Club is an exhibition anyone – professional or amateur – can submit work for, using the hashtag #girltownPM on Instagram. Talks, including one on photojournalist Jane Bown, as well as film screenings are also in the offing over the course of the month.

6 October – 1 November, St Margaret’s House, 21 Old Ford Road, Bethnal Green, E2 9PL
stmargaretshouse.org.uk

‘They Shall Not Pass’: East Londoners at the Battle of Cable Street in October 1936. Photograph: Tower Hamlets History Library

80th Anniversary of the Battle of Cable Street

On 4 October 1936 East Londoners came together to stop Oswald Mosley and his fascist ‘Blackshirts’ from marching through Cable Street in Stepney, then a predominantly Jewish area. 80 years on and the Cable Street Group is to hold an exhibition of photographs of the Battle of Cable Street, alongside other memorabilia and events to remember this important moment in East End history.

Until 18 October, Idea Store Watney Street, 260 Commercial Road, E1 2FB
ideastore.co.uk

An image from Dalston Carnival, which features in Dalston Street Show. Photograph: Tom Ferrie

Dalston Street Show

Images of the many faces of Dalston – its people, streets and buildings – will adorn shop windows, restaurants, bars, cafés and Dalston venues this month. Featuring an array work by local photographers such as Dougie Wallace, the Dalston Street Show opens on 14 October in Dalston Square with an event that will see a giant inflatable screen display images from the show with a musical accompaniment from Band Off the Wall.

14 October–14 November, Kingsland High Street, Dalston Lane, Dalston Square, Ashwin Street, Ridley Road, Bradbury Street, Gillett Square

Thames Estuary, from After London exhibition at Cass Bank Gallery. Photograph: David George

After London

Essex-based artist Simon Fowler has created an intimate portrait of the Thames Estuary in an exhibition that coincides with the publication of Estuary: Out from London to the Sea by East London writer Rachel Lichtenstein. Another strand of the exhibition is Estuary English by David George, whose own photographic exploration of the Thames Estuary focuses on the region’s gothic associations.

Until 15 October, Cass Bank Gallery, 59-63 Whitechapel High Street, E1 7PF
londonmet.ac.uk/thecass

Best of the rest

Territorial – 20 October–20 November, Bank Space Gallery, The Cass, 59-63 Whitechapel High Street
Showcasing the work of six contemporary photographic practitioners whose work is concerned with concepts of human geography, identity and territory.

Domestic Disorder – Until 5 November, Idea Store Canary Wharf
Images by Sian Bonnell that challenge ideas of the ordered domestic life.

Uncertain States – 4 November – 27 November, Mile End Arts Pavilion, Grove Road
Fifty artists present a selection of contemporary and thought provoking photography in annual exhibition.

The Transaction – Until 13 October, Canvas Café, 42 Hanbury Street
Exhibition about people in India who work in public spaces. Artist Kathryn Geels tasked herself with one job: to get them to smile for the camera.

Lived Brutalism: Portraits at Robin Hood Gardens – 3 October–21 October, St Matthias Community Centre, 113 Poplar High Street
Photographs recording the lives of residents at Robin Hood Gardens the ‘streets in the sky’ development currently facing demolition.

September 22, 2016
Along the Hackney Canal – book review: ‘A refined eye for the sublime’

Photograph: Freya Najade

In her astute and poetic introduction to photographer Freya Najade’s latest book, writer Esther Kinsky explains how East London’s “canals and the River Lea form a layered landscape of urban histories, of comings and goings, of the shifting interferences of land and water and nature and man”.

She’s describing a complex network of collision and change, and she touches on how a landscape, in the eye of its many beholders, is distinct and subjective.

“But not everyone feels the need to decipher it,” she writes.

Najade is one of the few, and her stunning collection Along the Hackney Canal is testament to her patience, her refined eye for the sublime and her apparent urge to explore the diversity of experience and place.

For a project focused on what might seem like a relatively narrow, objective topic, the images – always effective – are remarkably disparate and personal. It’s this variety and versatility that really elevates the work.

The collection begins with a moody, Dickensian scene of bare deciduous trees, placid water and thick mist. Slim branches intertwine and protrude at gothic angles. You can easily imagine Abel Magwitch, of Great Expectations, emerging from the deep; it’s a great start.

Photograph: Freya Najade

Amongst the photos that immediately follow is a series of more abstract shots of the water, with close-ups of its contents, which include a ducking swan, dreamlike reflections of puffy clouds and a plastic Iceland bag suspended in the flow.

Photograph: Freya Najade

There’s a painterly quality to some of these compositions, with colour and texture taking on an almost impressionistic dimension. One shot, of a mass of non-descript green matter in water, could easily be compared, in part, to a Turner – or even a Monet.

Photograph: Freya Najade

Flicking further, we encounter perfect arrangements of yellow-flowering bushes in full bloom, a cormorant arching its wings against a tangle of brown thicket, and a CCTV camera shooting vertically from foliage, recalling the gas lanterns of a stereotypically Victorian topography, but with a more sinister, voyeuristic edge.

Photograph: Freya Najade

Photograph: Freya Najade

Litter, or waste, runs throughout – an abandoned trolley, a derelict moped and a cardboard packet floating amidst a swirl of iridescent specks are juxtaposed by, for example, the flesh of red berries and a twist of brambles covered in frost.

Photograph: Freya Najade

A few images in particular are simply spectacular, and whoever at Hoxton Mini Press edited the project did a sterling job selecting which to draw specific attention to.

Roughly half of the photos are afforded a double page, some of which are extremely special: there’s a row of pastel-coloured houseboats lining the foggy banks of what looks like the Lea Navigation; there’s a gathering of Orthodox Jewish people running races on marshland; and there’s a snap of long golden grass, dry and swaying in an almost Southern-gothic manner.

Photograph: Freya Najade

You can imagine these three dramatic prints hanging in grand frames on the walls of our swankiest galleries.

Kinsky, in her intro, also writes about how “Freya’s gaze is not directed into the distance but into the depth of her field of vision, searching for the underlying layers of older landscapes spelt into the land”.

There is something in this that rang especially true for me when considering an image towards the end of the collection.

At the front of the shot is the canal, behind it a relic of old heavy industry and scattered further back are the traces of London’s relentless development; it’s a scene worth studying.

It would be a huge pleasure to work through Along the Hackney Canal in tandem with author Helen Babbs’s brilliant recent release, Adrift: A Secret Life of London’s Waterways.

Along the Hackney Canal is published by Hoxton Mini Press.
ISBN: 9781910566114. RRP: £14.95

Photograph: Freya Najade

Photograph: Freya Najade

September 5, 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
Lost in the City: photographs of the Square Mile inject life into icy scenes

Places to go: busy office workers make strides. Photograph: Nicholas Sack

Photographer Nicholas Sack’s Lost in the City is a collection of images exploring London’s financial district.

The series positions the people of this strange world – generally office workers, occasionally stray tourists – against the imposing architecture, creating a sub-reality that on first impression is alien and oppressive, but captivating, nonetheless.

When I reviewed the book back in January for the East End Review, I described the images as “cold and clinical” and commented on how the patterns and symmetries in the buildings mirror the repetitive routines of nine-to-five commerce.

I was impressed by the geometry, the meticulous and rigid order that Sack arranges within the viewfinder. But most of all, I found the volume detached, harsh and haunting.

But on meeting the photographer and discussing his work, I quickly realise that my initial perceptions only skimmed the surface of what is a complex and multilayered project.

Sack has been photographing the City of London for 30 years and there’s more to this latest assemblage, taken from the last decade, than first meets the eye.

Under construction: building site in financial district. Photograph: Nicholas Sack

Drinking beer in the Crosse Keys on Gracechurch Street, a striking old banking hall built on the site of an ancient coaching inn and since taken over by JD Wetherspoon, Sack runs me through a selection of his black and white prints; some are from the book and others are not, but the subject remains the same.

“I find some of these human gestures, these angles, the way people sit and stand, very interesting… there’s a sort of vulnerability or unwitting disclosure,” he says, describing what he likes most about a shot of three people eating lunch on a concrete bench.

“I’m not looking for car crashes or great dramatic events. It’s really just the tiniest gesture that can look most interesting.”

He points his pen at one lady’s foot, which has slipped out from her shoe and is caught in a surprisingly elegant pose. This tiny detail, which I miss at first but is clearly the main focus for Sack, warms the image significantly.

Whether it is through discomfort or ease, the subtlety makes the composition less symmetrical, more familiar and ultimately more human.

Many of the pictures in Lost in the City contain such minutiae: there’s a pointed finger, an open purse, a splayed hand resting against bare shin, for example – all of which show Sack to be a sympathetic photographer.

Amidst the stark, difficult landscape, he finds spontaneous moments of simple beauty that inject life into the icy scenes.

Of an image of five men in crisp white shirts marching past the Bank of England, he explains: “This is a feature of the camera catching things quickly; while these men are clearly affluent, working in high finance, they also reveal a physical delicacy.

“Those heels that are on the floor with the toes pointing upwards strike a balletic pose that doesn’t quite fit with the image of the thrusting alpha male.”

All of a sudden, the men are no longer marching; they are breezing through the City.

This new perception adds an ethereal quality that intensifies the juxtaposition between the looming buildings and the figures below. Whilst the contrast could suggest a political stance on Sack’s part – criticising the capitalist regime – he insists that despite his staunchly socialist upbringing this is not the case.

“I’m looking at things purely from a visual point of view,” he says. “My feelings about what these people are doing are quite separate – they really don’t intrude at all. In fact, I like to get to the stage where the real world becomes abstract – I’m a formalist in that way.

“People assume that I think the City and Canary Wharf are sterile and repetitive and monotonous, which is not true – that’s not the way I feel. I find the regularity and uniformity rather exciting.”

Harsh beauty: man on walkway in East London. Photograph: Nicholas Sack

Sack’s artistic education was diverse, but in its way perfect for his chosen topic. Born in Sussex and raised predominantly in Greenwich, he studied urban planning at Aston University, before returning to London to do a postgraduate degree in journalism.

At the same time as working an office job, he played the drums in rock bands, which he says contributed to his appreciation of rhythm and structure.

“I think that being a drummer relates to some of this love of order. There’s a metronomic steadiness to things that I appreciate visually, so there may well be a connection.”

He didn’t pick up a camera, however, until his mid-20s, when a fellow student introduced him to the darkroom.

He was instantly hooked. “I ended up photographing freelance for 30 years, mostly for business magazines and corporate clients. So it wasn’t pre-planned and I’ve had no formal training, which is to my detriment in many ways, because I’ve picked up bad habits and I’ve had to work pretty much intuitively.”

Though he’s photographed abroad and on regular long walks in the countryside, Sack hasn’t strayed too far from the capital.

As such, he’s become something of an authority on the territory; he’s also been influenced over the last decade by the roving methods of his literary hero, Iain Sinclair, who provided an insightful introduction to Lost in the City.

“The fact that I’ve lived in London all my life and I’ve done it on foot, because I’ve never had a car, means that I know all these cut throughs and alleys… I love that. It’s as though I’m a tourist but with privileged information, an inside knowledge.”

Nicholas Sack. Photograph: Timothy Cooke

Despite the technological advances of recent years, Sack has remained dedicated to film photography. He shoots in black and white, he doesn’t use a tripod and he refuses to crop any of his images, relying entirely on his skill to perfect the frame in the field. He describes himself as a dinosaur and explains that he loves the craft process.

“I enjoy the interregnum, if you like, the hiatus – the time between shooting the picture and knowing what’s there on the film. I enjoy the period of not knowing. It’s my stand against instant gratification. It might be months before I see what’s on the film, and then it may be years before I print what’s there. I enjoy that – it’s part of the mystery and beauty of photography.”

There’s a level of intensity to Sack and his approach that as we chat becomes more apparent. He seems to aspire to a state of heightened awareness, which, he says, allows him to almost anticipate what’s coming around the corner. Moreover, he doesn’t own a TV, is a serious collector of books and photographs, and he prints his images in month-long stints. There’s a discipline here, an august devotion that serves him well.

But it’s his enthusiasm for the medium that leaves the strongest impression: “This is what’s special to photography. In painting you could make all this up, couldn’t you, through your imagination. For me, the glory is in seeing it, actually being there and witnessing real life. And often not realising the significance until later, until I see the pictures in the darkroom.”

Lost in the City is published by Hoxton Mini Press. ISBN: 9781910566039. RRP: £12.95

June 17, 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
Va-va zoom! Photomonth is upon us once more

Living in Exile by Matthew Aslett. Part of F8 Collective launch, until 18 October at Hive Dalston

With more than 100 Photomonth exhibitions to take in over October and November, and at least 500 contributing artists, it is understandably difficult to know exactly where to focus one’s gaze.

The state of London today is a common theme among work presented this year. For his satirical series Harrodsburg, Glaswegian Dougie Wallace ventured into West London, where he papped the mega rich out shopping in what he calls a “story of glut, greed and the widening wealth gap”.

Harrodsburg by Dougie Wallace. Until 19 October at theprintspace

Portraits of a different kind line the walls of one East End institution. Seven photographers have snapped the tourists, shoppers, revellers and stressed out office workers who frequent Brick Lane Beigel Bake, with the results on display there this month.

6am by Jonathan Goldberg part of Twentyfour7 exhibition. Until 22 November at Brick Lane Beigel Bake

The future of East London in the face of luxury blocks of flats and rising living costs is of concern to Hackney Wick resident Ansell Cizic. In The Wick and Beyond, he records those artists whose very presence in the East has helped it become an attractive proposition for property developers.

Venice Mob from East End, by Ansell Cizic. The Wick and Beyond until 1 November at Well Hung Gallery

Jerwood Drawing Prize nominee Pete Burke takes a more voyeuristic look at what the future holds. Glimpsing the Future is a series of photographs taken through building site peepholes in Hackney, which he is displaying alongside drawings that act as a route between them.

Dalston Junction by Pete Burke, part of Glimpsing the Future, until 1 November

Not all the exhibitions are about the here and now. Syd Shelton’s photographs of the 1970s Rock Against Racism movement capture an intriguing political period in which musicians and political activists confronted racist ideology on the streets and in parks.

Photograph by Syd Shelton, part of Rock Against Racism, until 5 December at Autograph ABP

Global issues come to the fore with Africa’s Last Colony, which remembers conflict in Western Sahara 40 years ago with never before seen images by UK-based photographers , while Kites from Kabul, a series of photographs of kite flying sights around Kabul and Bamiyan, provides an insight into the lives of children living in war-torn Afghanistan. (12)

Quintana Valero, Africa’s Last Colony: 40 Years Not Forgotten, until 28 October at Hundred Years Gallery

Oculi by Andrew Quilty, part of Kites from Kabul, until 3 January at the V&A Museum of Childhood

As usual for Photomonth, there’s a staggering breadth of work on display, with subjects that push boundaries and defy categorisation. Zoo Logic by David O’Shaughnessy looks at captivity through photographs of the environments in which zoo animals are presented to the public, and Piotr Karpinski’s photographs of people doing strange things in morgues and graveyards view life and death with humour and originality.

Cercopithecus Wolfi by David O’Shaughnessy, part of Zoo Logic. Until at Stour Space

Old Woman with Narcissus by Piotr Karpinski, Let’s Talk about Life & Death Darling from 1–30 November at St James the Great Church

Deciding where to go is perhaps the main drawback to Photomonth, but with the standards of exhibitions seemingly ever rising there’s a fair chance that whatever you choose will be a winner.

October 7, 2015
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
The Gentle Author on Spitalfields Nippers: ‘These children were born in these circumstances and these photographs are the result’

Tommy Nail and Willie Dellow. Photograph: Horace Warner

For over a century, Horace Warner’s photographs of Spitalfields were hidden in his grandson’s house in East Anglia.

The Gentle Author, pen name of the Spitalfields Life blog’s anonymous author, managed to contact Warner’s grandson and see the snaps.

They show the youth of Spitalfields in alleys, byways and yards, chopping wood, washing windows and playing games. In one photograph children are playing Sally Go Round the Moon, a game still played by children today.

The Gentle Author points out that Warner’s photographs are in stark contrast to those by social campaigners in the same era.

“There’s a lot of joy in these photographs. Warner knew these children. He was the superintendent of the Sunday school at the Bedford Institute and they loved him.

“Images by social campaigners wanted to make the children look as poor as possible. The children became emblems of poverty.” The images join a selection purchased by the Bedford Institute in the Gentle Author’s latest publication Spitalfields Nippers.

Thanks to information gathered from the 1901 census, the book includes more than 20 biographies of the children in the photographs.

They show how the children went on to work as boot finishers, mould makers and pressers. There are accounts of families living on Commercial Road with four of their ten children dead. Others went on to fight in World War II and live until they were 70.

Warner was a wallpaper designer as well as a photographer and there is a wonderful texture to his photographs, visible in the streets and clothes.

The clothes children wear contain their own history. Spitalfields was the centre of the clothing and textile industry for centuries. Children’s clothes came from the Houndsditch Rag Fair, and had been through a lot of owners. The market was eventually shut down because the clothes spread smallpox.

These are honest and compassionate photographs, carefully selected and bound. “These weren’t the good old days and they weren’t the bad old days,” adds The Gentle Author. “These children were born in these circumstances and these photographs are the result.”

Spitalfields Nippers is published by Spitalfields Life. RRP: £20.00.ISBN: 9780957656949

January 23, 2015