Photograph by Josephine Kibuka @Futureversity

From imaginative portraits of Victorian children to a bleak snapshot of climate change, photos are cropping up all around Hackney as part of a festival celebrating photographers living and dead.

Photomonth – now so big it runs for two months a year – is now well underway. Venues range from art schools such as Sir John Cass to Spitalfields retailers and local cafés, with over 100 places signed up to show prints. The festival stretches from Pages of Hackney to Spitalfields Market, and from the Jerusalem Tavern in Clerkenwell to Stour Space at Hackney Wick.

Exhibitions range from Victorian photographer, Julia Margaret Cameron, whose pictures of children hint at a lost innocent gaze, to the prolific local star Phil Maxwell, whose 40-year retrospective covers East London from the flared 1970s to the extremes of poverty and riches felt today.

As well as the shows, there are plenty of debates and lectures about the role photography plays in 2011. One of the festival’s most anticipated events is a talk organised by Amnesty International on the way campaigners used the internet to publish images from the Arab Spring on Thursday 29 November.

If you want a more hands-on experience Photomonth, Alternative Arts have planned two guided walks for Sunday 6 and 12 November.

The first follows part of a historic East London route, the Porter’s Path, to get an insight into how Victorian and Edwardian trades around Broadway Market, while the second hops around photographers’ favourite spots in Stoke Newington – its ‘castle’, churches, park, cemetery and high street – to compare modern images with old.

Whilst the festival has a broad appeal for anyone interested in art and local history, festival organiser Maggie Pinhorn says that the event has special relevance to the people behind the viewfinders: “It presents many opportunities for photographers – there are lots of workshops and discussions about professional development, such as the portfolio reviews and the debate at Amnesty International.

“Photomonth has been running for 11 years and just gets bigger every year as more and more photographers participate.”

Finally, there’s a nod to homegrown talent on Thursday 24 November when the local museum screens work by leading Hackney photographers such as Tom Hunter, Stephen Gill and Jenny Matthews. Works like Hunter’s shopkeeper portraits, Gill’s Hackney Flowers and Matthews’ smile-raising street portraits show us the area we know and love through a stranger’s eyes.

2011.photomonth.org

A photo from the Father and Son exhibition

An upcoming photography exhibition at the Fishbar gallery in Dalston will shed light on the multi-faceted nature of Indian society in Delhi from the 1950s onwards.

Father and Son offers two generational perspectives, with Richard Bartholemew taking a poignant look through the lens at an emerging 50s bohemia that helped to shape the city’s individuality and his son Pablo documenting the visceral immediacy of backstreet life in 70s Delhi. Both photographers beautifully captured the simplicity of everyday life as well as the tribulations behind the scenes of the bustling city’s everyday veneer.

The show runs from 1st – 21st September in an old converted fish and chip shop that now serves as a photography studio, run by photographers Olivia Arthur and Philipp Ebeling.

Father and Son
1 – 21 September
Fishbar
176 Dalston Lane E8 1NG

I Am Here is a response to the experience of living in an estate in the process of being regenerated. The housing estate, and Samuel House, is located alongside Regents Canal in between Kingsland Road and Victoria Park. Photograph: Fugitive Images

Andrea Luka Zimmerman and Lasse Johansson are both artists who live on Haggerston & Kingsland Estate and have been capturing its gradual and ongoing demolition. On Wednesday 20 July, they exhibited their work and held a discussion at the Floating Cinema outside Shoreditch Trust’s Waterhouse Restaurant on the Regents Canal.

The artists have placed the regeneration of the estate at the centre of a series of projects documenting the changes in the local area. Their collaboration, Fugitive Images, installed photographs of residents, past and present, on the facade of the estate as part of a project called I Am Here.

Zimmerman said: “We called the project I Am Here instead of We Are Here because we didn’t want to give a sense of coherence and community. What actually is a community? We wanted to say: ‘there are all these different people together in this place.”

The demolition began in 2009 and is due to be completed in 2012 but during this time of transition a greater sense of unity appears to be developing.

“At the moment, we have an open-access estate, people can walk in and out of it. Since the I Am Here project came about, the residents applied for funding, we got a table-tennis table, people have made murals, picnic areas and there are flower beds everywhere. It’s run-down but it’s really beautiful.”

There are 43 flats still occupied within the estate and 15 current residents can be seen in the photographs on the outside of the building.

“The reason why we chose these passport-type photographs was to have an image play on categorisation,” said Zimmerman. “People are always categorised and then fears and prejudices are much easier to be conveyed in the media.”

“A lot of people said, ‘I would never live there, it looks dirty, those net curtains, they must all be junkies.’ It wasn’t very positive.

“But there are ordinary families. People fell in love there, people have grown old in these buildings.”

The project has provoked debate about the estate’s past, present and future, allowing for a successful screening and discussion along the Regents Canal during this year’s Shoreditch Festival.

The hard work of the residents and Fugitive Images is vulnerable to the inevitable changes throughout the regeneration process. Zimmerman, along with her fellow residents and those present at the screening, will strive to retain the new atmosphere in the estate as it is redeveloped: “Hopefully we’ll keep some of the spirit we have now.”

Princess Toshi by Tom Hunter. Photograph: Tom Hunter

This article titled “Royal Wedding: Tom Hunter: ‘All the other royal marriages have fallen apart now’” was written by Ian Tucker, for The Observer on Saturday 16th April 2011 23.05 UTC

Tom Hunter’s work documents the lives of his friends and fellow residents of Hackney, east London. Borrowing ideas from old masters such as Velázquez and Vermeer, his work lends a dignity to the sometimes prosaic lives of his subjects.

Soon after accepting our brief to produce an artwork commemorating the royal wedding, Hunter was studying coverage of the tsunami and saw the rare TV appearance of the emperor of Japan. He began reading about the Japanese royal family and in particular Princess Toshi, the emperor’s granddaughter, who will be prevented from succeeding to the Chrysanthemum Throne because she’s female.

Coincidentally, Hunter’s friend Kev is married to a Japanese girl, also called Toshi, so he decided to shoot her in a cafe posing as the princess, contemplating her situation and the ephemeral nature of royal weddings. She pokes at the bun on her Fergie and Andrew commemorative plate and studies the Charles and Di mug and the Japanese royal figurines on the table.

“She’s thinking about all the other royal weddings,” says Hunter. “They’ve all fallen apart now.”

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010

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Photo: Tara Darby

We Are Only Humans: Photographs of Hackney 2001-2009 is a new book by Tara Darby.

Darby moved to Hackney in 2000 and soon took to carrying her camera around with her and taking pictures of local people who caught her eye.

She recounts how she rapidly became enchanted with her surroundings: “I just wanted to take pictures, I didn’t have a preconceived notion of what the series would be.  I let myself see what was there without judgement, and the more I looked the more I saw”.

The resulting series of photographs documents the borough over the eight year period between 2001 and 2009, a period in which parts of Hackney fell prey to gentrification, yet also a period of considerable economic hardship
for many.

The collection offers a fresh and mildly quirky insight in to the denizens of the borough during this time. The photos are mostly portraits, some posed and others more spontaneous. They capture, place, personality and the relationship between the two in a small but compelling series of images.

“The title We are only Humans refers to the beauty in the mundane, strength and dignity; that we are singular, not individuals … sometimes isolated, sometimes united but all part of a larger picture,” explains Darby.

We Are Only Humans: Photographs of Hackney 2001-2009 is published by Miniature Love, 2011, 32pp, 189 x 264 mm, with text by Heidi James, Edition of 100, £10 + postage.

The Town Pigeon. Photo:© Stephen Gill

Birdwatchers have a lot in common with photographers. They watch, they wait, they notice things that would pass most people by.

It is not surprising, then that Hackney-based photographer Stephen Gill has a thing for birds, or that bird-watching played a key role in his development as a photographer.

“Photography, birds and animals all merged for me as a teenager as I was fascinated with those things”, says Gill. “I spent much time photographing birds when I was around 13 years old sitting patiently waiting for a bird to land in a spot where I had placed food and carefully set up my Dixons Miranda camera and long air cable release running into the kitchen. Through photography and with the help of the Observer’s book of birds I got to know the different species that visited our garden.”

In his new A Book of Birds, Gill returns to the subject that initially drew him into photography. “About 20 years later after spending more time making work inspired by cities (mostly East London) I decided to re visit the subject of birds,” he recounts. “This time in the city and built up areas. I wanted to make a study of how birds fit and mould their lives around ours and adapt to what we have created.  I was also very interested to hear that scientists found that birds in towns and cities sing louder or use higher frequencies compared to the same rural species so they can be heard above the man-made noise.”

As with much of Gill’s work, the approach in these photos is oblique. His avian subjects sit in trees, on telephone lines or on roofs. Yet the birds in the photos are tiny, dwarfed by the urban landscapes they inhabit and often difficult to identify at all. You see the birds because the titles of the photos – ‘The Blue Tit’, ‘The Hooded Crow’ – instruct you to look for them. But to see them you have to search, to really look hard at what is in each photo; in other words, you have to become a birdwatcher. And in so doing, you start to notice things in these seemingly banal urban landscapes that you would not otherwise have picked up – the texture of a stone wall, tiny flowers nestled in a bed of grass, the numbers on a lamppost.

At first sight, these photos might appear somewhat bland, but one is soon drawn into their ingenuousness, into the where’s-wally-like games they play with the viewer, and into a renewed interest in birds.

A Book of Birds by Stephen Gill is published by SUPER LABO in association with Nobody. Limited edition of 500, 32 Pages, 15 images, £19.00.

When someone is photographed, they become special, important, worth looking at; but they also become objects, to be looked at. How can those represented also tell their own stories?

Acclaimed photojournalist Gideon Mendel has struggled with this question throughout his twenty-five-year-plus career. “It’s something I’ve never quite resolved,” he says.

For his latest project, jointly conceived with Kingsmead Primary School in Homerton, Mendel tackled this problem by inviting his subjects to become documentary photographers themselves.

As well as taking portraits of all the school’s pupils, eventually combined in a large composite image, he and fellow photographer Crispin Hughes gave them cameras and trained them to document their own lives.

The result is Kingsmead Eyes, a collaborative exhibition in the Bethnal Green Museum of Childhood, co-funded by the school and Sanctuary Housing Association.

For Mendel, resident in Hackney for 17 years, it involved “finding photographic meaning as much around the corner as on the other side of the world”.

His composite portrait is striking and compelling. The kids meet your gaze full on, solemn, unsmiling. You look into serious eyes; and if you turn around, you can look out from those eyes too.

On the opposite wall are works by the 28 children who participated in the project: each has contributed one photograph and an accompanying handwritten poem.

The poems were written with the guidance of Joelle Taylor, poet-in-residence at the school for the past two years, where she is known as “the rapping lady”.

Her beatbox poetry workshops, says headteacher Louise Nichols, “have been a huge success in helping the children to express themselves”, especially important when 85% of pupils do not have English as a first language.

The school’s decision to collaborate with these leading artists and to entrust the kids with Panasonic Lumix cameras (most of which survived), demonstrates its commitment to creative excellence. As Mendel says, he wanted to “go somewhere special, different.”

And they did. Some media coverage has presented the exhibition as a novelty: a sort of highbrow “Kids Say The Funniest Things”.

But these works are worthy of attention not because they’re created by ten-year-olds from a deprived part of London, but in their own right.

The photographs, selected by Mendel and Hughes together with the children from over 3000 images, are oddly beautiful, moving snapshots of lives as they are lived.

Food features heavily: toasted sandwiches, chips and salad, gloriously coloured Smarties. Zainab Ahmed’s close-up of homemade cake, thick with icing and hundreds-and-thousands, might seem a comforting image without her accompanying text: I was a tiny cute baby when people came to my house / Such delicious food, / Licking their fingers, / I would stick out my hand wanting some / I am still waiting.

This arresting, unexpected gloss reminds you that children see the world as anything but straightforward.
Other representations reflect their personal significance to their owners. When Sefora Lema wears her ‘sparkling, magical, wonderful’ crown, she writes, ‘I’m the queen’. Especially viewed in the Museum of Childhood, these photographs evoke the real power of these treasured objects.

Terrence Aidoo has photographed three teenage boys, football champions; seen from below, against a bright blue sky, they look monumental, proud, heroic.

Family members appear often, offering glimpses of part-shared, part-hidden lives. Omar Kanyi’s photograph of a group of men in his living room takes you back to hovering on the edges of half-understood adult conversations.

But children see and hear much more than adults may realise. We see Jordan Lema’s mother through the kitchen door on the phone to his father in Africa; he writes of her efforts to stay brave and her private prayers. Kingsmead eyes see you.

Mendel’s previous work, particularly his award-winning documentation of  those living with HIV/AIDS, proves him to be a highly political and ethically-engaged photographer, and the exhibition inevitably touches on contemporary social issues, such as one boy’s work in memory of his brother’s friend, stabbed ‘by a flick knife’.

But there are no didactic messages here. Socioeconomically and culturally, the Kingsmead pupils come from very mixed backgrounds: 95% are from ethnic minorities.

But Mendel wanted to “avoid romanticising” deprivation without denying the existence of “difficult, painful things in society”.

His own mesmerising images of the Kingsmead Estate came from his close involvement with the community, and provide the contextual overview which complements the children’s stranger, sideways takes.

The children’s photographs could be flatly read as indicators of class or culture, but what you see instead is their personal meaning: my balcony, my brother’s bedroom.

Dennis Fofanah’s photograph of an apparently unremarkable pair of closed curtains is transformed by his writing: ‘Behind the green curtain is a parallel universe’.

Echoing this, other children tell of ‘secret clubhouses’ and ‘secret games’. Temporarily, we are allowed into these private, magical spaces.

No adult, regardless of skill or experience, could have created these images and words. Secret games are only secret if you’re not playing too.

As Mendel says, “the holy grail of documentary photography is intimate access”, and nothing can “compete with the access a child has to their own life”.

By sharing their own lives, these children become not statistics or symbols but people, with richly individual existences.

Kingsmead eyes have seen, and this is what they saw.

The Scar
By Tafari Dyer

He was sixteen years old
Reckless and bad
Some said a man with a motorbike
And a head full of fast bends
He flew as a hill
And everything went black
He woke up in a hospital bed with a big scar
As long as a silver railway track
That led to his new dream

—

I laid down these words for you
By Kyle McDiarmuid

Out on my balcony
I saw a white shadow
It had eyes, a nose and a chin
I saw a glimpse of a light in a window
The curtain moves but no one’s there
But there was a face of fog
I went back in
It was following me
I put my hand there
It disappeared
It was a ghost

—

Kingsmead Eyes: A collaborative exhibition by Gideon Mendel and Kingsmead School 7 November 2009 – 7 February 2010 Front Room Gallery, V&A Museum of Childhood, Bethnal Green

Upsherin Photo: © Andrew Aitchison

If you live in Hackney, you’ve seen them: otherworldly figures in black hats and coats, flowing beards and sidelocks, perhaps with an incongruous Coke can or mobile phone in hand.

They are the Hassidim, the Orthodox Jews of North-East London.

Even to other London Jews, they’re something of a mystery. This is a thoroughly self-contained community with its own schools, shops, and housing estates.

So Andrew Aitchison’s new exhibition and accompanying book constitute something of a coup. When he moved to Stamford Hill, Aitchison (originally from very un-Semitic Wiltshire) was inspired to begin a personal photography project, documenting the lives of his Orthodox Jewish neighbours.

Over five years, he gained the trust of the community through a combination of persistence and respect. The result of this trust is an exhibition of ten canvas-printed photographs offering a rare insight into the rituals and habits of Orthodox Jewish life.

Many are visually striking: ‘New Sefer Torah’, a sea of black coats and hats punctuated by pale, watchful faces, and ‘Pidyon Haben’, a richly-coloured close-up of a baby being draped in gleaming, intricate gold jewellery.

While Aitchison places his own work squarely in the documentary tradition, many of these photographs appear highly stylised. The face of the young boy learning the Torah in ‘Upsherin ’ is illuminated in surrounding blackness; this may be an accidental effect, but nevertheless its light and composition is reminiscent of classical painting.

Almost all these photographs are of men; only one picture has any women in it. Aitchison explains that this is partly due to the difficulty of photographing women, and also because of his wish to respect the community’s desire for privacy.

If there’s a criticism of this exhibition, it’s that there’s no particular ethos behind it; Aitchison simply wanted to document these rarely-shown scenes.

However, the photographs are fascinating in their own right and the exhibition is worth visiting, if only to glimpse a world very nearby, but somehow very far removed.

‘Orthodox Jewish Life’ is at Madame Lillie’s Gallery, 10 Cazenove Road N16 6BD until Sunday 6 December.

Opening hours Friday – Sunday 12-6pm. To view by appointment: 07990695363.

Sally Hammond, 10, lives with her parents and brother, Jesse, 9, on the Kingsmead estate. This is a self-portrait of her at home in her dressing gown Photograph: Sally Hammond

More information: Kingsmead Eyes.

The Pongala festival is the largest all-women festival in the world

Jules Lily’s work celebrates the Pongala festival in south India, the largest all-women festival in the world.

The photographs were taken in Kerala, a state which boasts the highest female literacy rates in India. Lily’s compelling photographs show women who successfully challenge the stereotypes.

The photographs themselves are bursts of vivid colour, conveying a vivid sense of worship and celebration.

The name of the Hindu festival Pongala, literally means ‘to boil over’, because of the ritual involved: making a religious offering of a porridge made using rice, molasses, coconut, nuts and raisins.

This ritual is only undertaken by the Hindu women who sit outside the temple passing between them the fire, lit by the chief priest from the temple to warm their concoctions.

Thousands of women join together and assemble for the festival every year, spilling over the streets around the temple and sharing the fire.

Jules Lily photographs of the celebration are being showcased at Pages of Hackney, Clapton from 20 October until 17 November.

On Thursday 22 October, Lily is giving a talk about the  exhibition and her experiences, as well as Kerala’s ‘unique communist feminist success story’. Tickets for this event are £3 including wine.

The photo show runs from 20 October until 17 November.

More information here.