Hackney Street Photographs 1978-2008

Funeral of Michael Ferreira, 19, who died in Stoke Newington police station after being stabbed in a racist attack in December 1978 Photograph: Alan Denney

Rubbish piled high on Stoke Newington Common in 1979, the opening of the Aziziye Mosque in 1984, a religious dispute at Ridley Road in 2008: it’s all here, the contemporary history of Hackney intimately charted in an upcoming retrospective of Alan Denney’s photographs.

Hackney Street Photographs 1978-2008 will be on show at Chats Palace in Homerton from 1 October as part of East London Photomonth Festival. The 50 photos that make up this exhibition display rich documentary evidence of the changing texture of the borough over this 30-year period.

Scenes of dire poverty stand cheek by jowl with revellers at festivals in a stew of local colour that is by turns charming and alarming. From the frumpy to the trendy, from the idle to the over-worked, Denney’s photos tell the story of these events through the people who lived them.

Denney started out taking photographs as a young man, and his photographs grew with him. He recounts, “As time progressed, my photographic gaze moved to different subjects. At first it was just family and friends, but as my socialist ideas developed, I began to see photography as a catalyst for social change, as a way of achieving some sort of social justice”.

He recalls the tentative advances of the first health food and vintage shops in Stoke Newington in the early 1980s as harbingers of the wave of gentrification that has swept the borough since that time. In retrospect, it is clear that during the period covered by this exhibition, Hackney underwent one of the most profound transformations in its history.

Denney recently began to appreciate the cultural value of his photos and sought means of bringing them to a wider audience. “I had always wanted the documentary photos that I took in the 1970s and 1980s to be seen, but I couldn’t work out how to do that. Then the internet came along.”

His large online archive of digitised photos was discovered by Peter Young who runs the Photochats project at Chats Palace, and Denney was invited to take part in the East London Photomonth Festival. Now everyone has a chance to see the borough’s social history come alive through Denney’s striking images.

Hackney Street Photographs 1978-2008 will be showing at Chats Palace, Brooksby’s Walk, E9, 1 October – 22 November.

Alan Denney’s photos may also be viewed here.