Chatsworth Road and Backstreets photography exhibition – review

Going to buy milk, Chatsworth Road. Photograph: Guilherme Zauith

For over six months, Brazilian photojournalist Guilherme Zauith has been documenting a period of history of Clapton’s Chatsworth Road and the community around it, and is now showing his work in a new exhibition, Chatsworth Road and Backstreets.

Once east London’s largest street market with over 200 stalls, the Chatsworth Road Market began to shrink during the economic malaise of the 1970s, and closed down completely during the mid 1990s.

But in recent years this pocket of Hackney is enjoying something of a renaissance. Several months ago the street market was re-opened following a campaign by the then newly-formed Chatsworth Road Traders and Residents Association, driven by a collective desire to promote independent local businesses on the high street.

Chatsworth Road caught Guilherme Zauith’s attention as he saw it as a distinctive community within Clapton. So he offered to take pictures for the residents and traders association and started to go to the area regularly to listen to people’s stories. “I am a very curious person so this was perfect to feed my need for the new,” he said. “It was like going to a different city every time I was there.”

His project depicts daily life within the neighbourhood at a time when recent changes have resulted in  a cleaning up of the streets, generated new businesses such as gourmet delicatessens and more local cafes, and raised rent and property prices, as the locals have come together to reclaim Hackney’s last independent high street and boost the existing sense of community pride.

From a Turkish woman picking vine leaves in her garden to an African boxer at the gym to children playing in the park, Guilherme’s images – a combination of portraiture and street photography – capture ordinary people doing ordinary things. But they do so in an understated yet beautiful way that showcases many different aspects of people’s everyday life.

As one onlooker put it: “he has found colour in London, in an area that’s otherwise all brown bricks.”

The exhibition is showing at 33 Chatsworth Road, an old dental surgery under new ownership after being abandoned for many years, now operating as a pop-up bar, music venue, theatre and gallery.

Chatsworth Road and Backstreets
Until Monday 1 November 2011

33 Chatsworth Road
Hackney
E5 OLH