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.
Terry Gilliam-eque: The animation of polemical short film Cosmico
Director C.J. Lazaretti’s latest short film Cosmico sees a jaded aristocrat literally feed off the world’s major religions: crucifixes are set on fire and pages are torn from the Quran. Animated similarly to the rustic cutouts of Terry Gilliam’s Monty Python work, Lazaretti’s short takes swipes at Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam and Judaism.
Needless to say, the film has polarised audiences, receiving an award and nominations at European animation festivals yet being booed at a screening in Bethnal Green, where the film was made, and where until recently director Lazaretti was living. Have people taken it too seriously?
Says Lazaretti: “We’ve gone beyond being easily offended. These days, people go out of their way to find offence in anything they see or hear.”
Talking about controversial film director Pier Paolo Pasolini, Lazaretti declares: “I agree with Pasolini when he says that to scandalise is a right, and that to be scandalised is a pleasure.”
Cosmico is funny and short, but not as offensive as audiences have claimed. Coming in at just over three minutes in length, it feels slight – not just in terms of running time, but in terms of content too. The animation and sound production is unique, but the film could have benefitted from being a few minutes longer to develop its ideas.
Lazaretti originally intended the film to be played on a loop. “Before I made Cosmico, I had a vague idea for a short film that could be played like a loop, inspired a bit by David Lynch’s Lost Highway,” he said. “I mulled it over for a while, simplifying the concept as much as I could.”
Cosmico is a promising short film, with great visuals, music and style, which the director would do well to expand on.
Do you dare enter the Funhouse? Illustration: Felix Decombat
Funhouse is a new quarterly for young writers and illustrators, which is launching early this month. Founded by Hackney-based editor Oliver Zarandi and designer Fran Marchesi, the magazine will publish stories and illustrations that would be less likely to appear in the more established literary venues.
The first issue is concerned with the body, with a fittingly fleshy colour running throughout its 94 pages. Think not graceful nudes or svelte athletes; these bodies tend toward the grotesque, with many of the stories feeling their way into disease and bodily transformations. The illustrations feature a series of people castrating each other, being punched in the head, missing noses.
The mag’s contributors include writers such as Richard Barnett, author of The Sick Rose, Patty Cottrell, Jason Schwartz and East London based comic artist Alex Widdowson. The inaugural issue’s front cover is by Will Laren who frequently contributes to Vice.
Moving forward, the Funhouse team is hoping to attract more East London writers and illustrators for the next issue in the aim of creating a local literary community. I caught up with Zarandi a few weeks before the first issue was due to come out and asked him the magazine’s genesis.
Where did the idea for Funhouse come from?
Funhouse has been an idea for a long time, but only in the last nine months has it really come to life. The name comes from a story by John Barth – ‘Lost in the Funhouse’ – and there was one point where I actually contacted John Barth. I emailed the university he used to teach at and they put me in touch with him. He said it sounded “fine” and said I should talk to his agent. Obviously, there was no reply. The whole Barth thing made me change my mind. It made me think maybe I was doing something old-fashioned. Sometimes literature and ‘art’ magazines can be very off-putting – too serious, too much text, not enough focus on younger writers, or events where you watch people read long poems for hours on end. Fran Marchesi and I wanted to make a magazine of writing and illustration that was respectful to the artists but still has its tongue firmly in cheek. We wanted Funhouse to be a bit naughty and print work that was offbeat, dark and funny.
Why a magazine? We heard a rumour that ‘print is dead’.
To say print is dead is a bit of a limiting statement. It’s like saying novels are dead, theatre is dead or film is dead. I think the reason I chose print as opposed to something digital is out of respect for the writers. As a writer myself, I would always prefer to have something tangible, something special. A lot of writers have work online, but then maybe a year or two later that link is dead. Fran and I wanted to create something beautiful. There’s a lot of illustration in Funhouse too, so again, we want people to actually pick up this magazine, to feel it. There are a lot of great print magazines and publishers out there right now – places like Test Centre, And Other Stories, The Alarmist, Hexus – who are all creating great print work.
What were your inspirations and what direction do you hope to take the magazine in?
For our first issue, we’ve definitely taken a lot of inspiration from American literature and publishers. A particular influence is Tyrant Books and their editor Giancarlo DiTrapano, who published New York Tyrant and, eventually, Preparation for the Next Life by Atticus Lish. It is an amazing book and Di Trapano did it his way. I’ve got a lot of respect for that. Funhouse has been a long, difficult journey. In the beginning, it was going in a lot of directions. It just wasn’t right.
But then I met Fran who designed the magazine, and we work really well together. We understand what works and we see things in the long term. Fran’s design is fantastic and we aim to publish longer works – novels, short story collections for example – in the next two years. We would like to gain a following first, however, and build relationships with writers and artists. When you look at somewhere like Galley Beggar Press and the great work they produce, it’s really encouraging.
Will there be cross-chat between the illustrations and the stories in each issue?
Each story will have an illustration to it, yes, but we also dedicate entire sections to artists too. We aim to give enough space to both text and illustration so the work can breathe. We are looking to change the colour scheme and ‘theme’ of each issue, too.
Who will your readers be and why will they read Funhouse? Funhouse will appeal to those who love good quality print, peculiar stories, punchy illustration and dark humour. It’s not just a magazine for one particular set of people, either. We are really interested in publishing writers from different backgrounds and different interests – not just writers, but comic book artists, internet poets and so on. We encourage people to just email us and talk to us about any work they have.
What would be the first sentence of your dream review of the magazine?
“Funhouse has a lot of balls. And arms, and ears, and other body parts too.”
In The Blood is Hackney filmmaker Mark Abraham’s first feature length film, and it wasn’t easy to get off the ground.
The story follows young drug addict Johnny (Joe Cole) who is kidnapped by a criminal gang and taken to an isolated farmhouse, where he is forced to crack open a safe using skills taught to him by the gang’s former safecracker, his deceased grandfather.
Abraham says: “It took about five years to get together. It was hard. Raising the money was difficult and getting everything together was difficult too. I’d never done it before, so I was learning on the job, trying to piece it all together.”
With influences ranging from American crime films such as The French Connection to French classics A Prophet and Mesrine, Abraham was determined to make something different from a typical British crime film.
“I wanted to do a more European kind of crime film,” he explains. “I wanted to do something a bit more real – a film with a story rather than stupid people doing stupid stuff.”
Featuring some of Britain’s finest acting talent such as Mike Leigh regulars Alison Steadman and Phil Davis, it is surprising that the film was made on such a low budget.
“It cost under £150,000. We had problems that we had to overcome in a different way. We paid everybody across the whole board the same amount of money,” says Abraham.
The film was shot in Abraham’s hometown of Dunstable too, which kept the costs down. They had to make the most of what was available to them.
“We had to do something low on cost, high on drama. No stunts and no stupid stuff,” adds Abraham.
Although his first feature film, Abraham has experience working with some of Hollywood’s top directors – the likes of Christopher Nolan, Guy Ritchie and Cary Fukunaga.
Getting to work on films such as The Dark Knight, Sherlock Holmes and Jane Eyre has been invaluable experience for Abraham: “You can’t pay for those kinds of experiences. To see Hollywood directors first hand, how they make a movie – it was the best education you could have.”
Despite the challenges he faced making his first feature, Abraham is proud – rather than relieved – now the film is finished.
For crime film aficionados (or even young directors looking to make their first film), In the Blood is certainly worth a look and has been confirmed to be screened at the Rooftop film club in Peckham on 15 June at 9pm.
“I’ve grown up always going for walks,” says Alice Stevenson. Having grown up in West London, Stevenson has walked the city for years and is now an East End resident.
Ways to Walk in London is her first book, and it came as a surprise to Stevenson, who primarily identified herself as an illustrator. It’s a collection of personal journeys across the capital, with the text complemented by her distinctive illustrations.
Stevenson sees London not just for its historical importance but for its unique atmosphere too.
Stevenson says: “Woolwich felt so remote and industrial, with these brutal, abstract structures and when I reached Greenwich it felt different, like a seaside town – maybe it’s because of its maritime history. It was such a contrast.”
Ways to Walk in London takes us to places such as the Isle of Dogs, Shadwell Basin and Hackney, and to the reflective surfaces of Canary Wharf. “I like how you can have all these different experiences in the same city,” says Stevenson.
The book doesn’t just focus on the physical side of the city though. Stevenson sees the process of walking as a vital source of artistic inspiration: “Walking makes really good memories,” she says. “When you’re on public transport and it’s busy, you don’t have time to sit back and observe things or think about how something feels. I think walking your life slows down. You start noticing things you wouldn’t physically have time to do otherwise. I find it very inspiring, visually.”
Stevenson sees a crucial difference between walking alone and walking with friends: “I feel when I walk by myself I become really fixated with details and notice things a lot more, whereas with a friend, you can talk to that person about the walk, which made it easier to work out. When I did walks on my own, it was tough to find out what the walk was about.”
Part of the book’s success is that the text is filled with keen observations and only the necessary historical details. Stevenson didn’t want the book to be a list of places and historical facts, but a document of her personal wanderings.
The text is stripped back, and Stevenson says she enjoyed the challenge of working to these limitations: “It forced me to physically edit it and stop it from rambling. I could’ve written hundreds of pages about these walks. For me, I’ve always admired minimal writers, which I think has something to do with being an illustrator, working with limitations.”
Stevenson’s book is a fetching tribute to walking, and to London. The book shows the city in all its beauty and contradictions and in all its details – the bare oaks of London Fields taking on a new “spectre-like dignity” in the fog. Stevenson’s passion for the city is infectious and the book is a good place to start for anybody thinking of exploring London further on foot.
Ways to Walk in London: Hidden Places and New Perspectives is published by September Publishing. ISBN: 9781910463024 RRP: £12.99
Film firebrands: Sergio Delgado, Ben Charles Edwards and James Hatt
“I get such a thrill from thinking about devastation. Sometimes I like to think that one day this will all be gone,” says Hackney-based filmmaker Ben Charles Edwards.
His latest film, Set The Thames on Fire, is the darkly comic story of Art and Sal, who live in a dream-like London of huge sparkling stars and shifting alleyways, full of danger and adventure. It stars Noel Fielding, Sally Phillips, and Michael Winder and Max Bennett as Art and Sal, respectively. The film is not just about the city but about friendship too, says Edwards.
“Cities come and go and walls fall. And do you know what? The first thing you’re going to think of is not your belongings – it’s the person that’s closest to you.”
The script, written with his friend Al Joshua, was partly based on their time living together in Shoreditch.
“The film is true to East London. They’re all familiar places – they’re just set in another world. A lot of the locations are in Hackney and Shoreditch,” says Edwards.
Living in a tall townhouse in Shoreditch, Edwards and Joshua used to sit on their flat roof overlooking the city. They would hold parties, have friends over and chat every night.
From this emerged the idea for the film of two boys living in East London, surrounded by friends and lurid East London characters.
“These characters never change,” says Edwards. “There is a blessing with never feeling comfortable or secure in a particular environment because you’re always going to be forced to move on or find something else to get some enjoyment from.”
It is this idea of feeling uncomfortable that is the key to understanding the film. “It’s a story of not fitting in in a dark world,” Edwards says.
The world of the film appears at once familiar and unfamiliar; Edwards took inspiration from the slums of the East End and fictional slums such as the Jago. It is in this world that Art and Sal find themselves, encountering characters such as the deranged Dickie – played by Fielding.
Edwards adds: ‘They’re just two guys who moved in together and discovered each other and how to live in a dark environment and a dark world – as London and any city can appear at times when you’re trying to live and make a living. Al and I never had any money at all, could never eat properly – they were dark times, and looking back it was friendship that got us through it. Set the Thames On Fire is a story about friendship and hope in a dark environment.’
Set The Thames On Fire is being produced by Sadie Frost’s production company Blonde to Black Pictures and will be released later this year.
Salt, a collection of poetry and photography by actor and writer Lucinda Lloyd, explores love and loss as well as innocence and experience. Published by A Little Bird Whispered – Lloyd’s own creation too – it is a collection put together with great care.
Poems such as ‘Naked’, ‘Milk’, ‘Quiet Time’ and ‘The Cage’ are terse and controlled. They are refreshing in their brevity, their economy of language.
‘The Weight of a Tear’, too, is excellent. Lloyd contemplates the coffin that will hold the body of her loved one. She writes about the “black dress” that will “contain your flesh”; the dress acting as a vessel for the body rather than merely clothing it. The collection is dedicated to Lloyd’s mother and this poem is certainly a fitting tribute.
However, not all of Lloyd’s poems work as well. ‘A Potent Sea’ is particularly overwrought, invoking “ancient echoes”, “azure air” and “tombs of majesty”. The imagery is overwhelming and, as a result, the poem loses power.
Lloyd’s poetry works best when it is confrontational and efficient. At other times it indulges in the language of the land and the elements, betraying her more honest poems. Her strengths lie less in describing nature than in portraying how we come to terms with tragedy.
Lloyd clearly has the ability to publish beautiful books, too. The physical quality of the collection is excellent, and includes some startling photography.
Salt is published by A Little Bird Whispered. RRP: £9.99. ISBN: 9780993070006
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
The work of 118 international artists feature at an exhibition at Transition Gallery entitled (detail), ranging from the well established to recent graduates. But instead of showing each work in its entirety, there is instead a close-up photograph of each work. The result is overwhelming, frustrating and innovative in equal measure.
The Andrew Bracey-curated exhibition originally launched at the H-Project Space in Bangkok, with all the artworks fitting around the unique, distinctive woodwork of the Thai house.
Bracey says that he liked the idea of the space dictating the images, adding: “I hope it has a very different identity, look and focus in each gallery.” Transition Gallery is certainly a different type of space, which means the prints fill the walls as a grid, like a schizophrenic quilt of contemporary art.
Details and fragments have always interested Bracey. “Going close is vital to my painting and viewing process and I have always been interested in how different things can be noticed by not focusing on the bigger view,” he says. He cites Gerhard Richter as an influence, noting that “his paintings appear to be details of a wider view or picture” – an influence played out in this exhibition.
The panels vary wildly in style and feeling. The placement of the works was random – artists’ names were pulled out of a hat. This feeling of experimentation and spontaneity is exciting. As the viewer is confronted by so many different styles, ideas, harmonies and contradictions, visiting the space is overwhelming and interesting in equal measure.
The norm at exhibitions is for visitors to view paintings from distance and move on, so it is refreshing to see the medium in a different way. Bracey is interested in the little brushstrokes and minute details of these close-ups.
Paintings by Enzo Marro, David Dipré and Fabian Marcaccio’s show these individual brushstrokes in forensic detail. The context of the entire work is not lost; a new meaning is born. There is a beauty to these images that recalls the work of Frank Auerbach.
Not all the prints work as close-ups, but this doesn’t detract from the whole. The ideas at play and the contradictions and range of images make this exhibition worth a visit. Bracey believes the idea of focusing is vital today, as it enables new things to arise and trickle out of what already surrounds us.
(detail) is at Transition Gallery, Unit 25a Regent Studios, 8 Andrews Road, E8 4QN until 12 October.
Life in the slums: Rainbow Collective’s documentary Mass E Bhat. Courtesy of Rainbow Collective
No tickets are required to see Rainbow Collective’s latest documentary at Rich Mix this month, though the screening isn’t free.
Instead, audience members are asked to bring along a bag of non-perishable food, to be donated to a food bank.
The Food for Films initiative shows how the East London-based Rainbow Collective is more than just a film production company.
Its founders, Richard York and Hannan Majid, formed the social enterprise to raise awareness of human rights issues.
Since its inception in 2006, the pair have shot, directed and produced documentaries in South African, Bangladesh, Iraq and the UK.
Their latest documentary Mass E Bhat, which premiered at the East End Film Festival in June, is the story of one man’s struggle to grow up and follow his ambitions in modern Bangladesh, with an original score by John Pandit.
The documentary follows Nasir, a social worker in the slums, who reflects on his early life working in rubbish dumps and sweatshops and how he achieved his dream of an education and the respect of his community. Along the way we meet several children whose lives mirror Nasir’s past but whose futures are uncertain.
Rainbow Collective crews are always diverse and often include students and local volunteers. “We wanted to use our skills as filmmakers to create social change,” says Majid.
Mass E Bhat wasn’t an easy film to make. Early on, Majid and York struggled to find the right structure that would hold the film together.
But then they did some work for Al Jazeera, which gave them experience of shooting quickly and under pressure. Returning to the documentary, they made “brutal edits” and managed to create a more focused film. The result is a striking documentary that manages to capture the movement, life and colour of Bangladesh.
Education and youth are a key part of Rainbow Collective’s vision. Footage that failed to make it into the final cut is going to be used to provide students with film training, with students getting the chance to re-edit the outtakes.
“So much of our work is about young people, which feeds into our youth projects,” says York.
This training aspect is designed to make entrance into the film industry more accessible. The filmmakers see Mass E Bhat as a way of reaching out to cinema goers and raising awareness while passing on the skills of documentary making to another generation.
