The World in London

Andrew Barnett, Brett Rogers and Charlotte Player with a photograph of India Dane Ngatama May from the Cook Islands. Photograph: Antonio Curcetti

Photos of nearly 200 Londoners feature in The World in London open-air exhibition in Victoria Park, organised by the Photographers’ Gallery to coincide with the Olympics.

The large-scale portraits, taken over the course of the past three years by established and emerging photographers depict one person from each of the states competing in the 2012 Games.

True, there are a small number of Pacific island states whose place in the A-Z of countries is taken up by a blank space, the vast majority of nations are represented in this unique picture of both London and the world – or, perhaps more aptly in a city where one in three residents was born outside the UK’s borders, London as the world.

Each portrait is accompanied by a QR code through which the viewer can hear the sitter’s story (also available at The World In London).

At the opening of the exhibition on 25 July, proud models and photographers posed in front of their photos as visitors gazed at the over-sized images running from Jomah Mohammadi from Afghanistan (shot by Matthew Tomkins) to Skye Chirape from Zimbabwe (shot by Zanele Muholi).

A number of Hackney-based photographers are included in the exhibition: Olivia Arthur (Mauritania), Tara Darby (Uruguay), Tom Hunter (Iceland), and Charlotte Player (Cook Islands).

Player’s photo of Cook Islander India Dane Ngatama May is an evocative image of a young woman who relates how she grew up in a one-room house built by her father: “It was quite nice growing up there. It was warm – we had no hot water. It was nice seeing the stars while you were in the shower.”

Speaking of his photo of Eva Agustsdottir, Tom Hunter says: “I took this photograph of Eva in London Fields, Hackney. It’s always been central to my life whether hanging out with friends, playing football, going to squat parties in the abandoned lido and now taking my kids to the playgrounds and the splash pool.

“It feels like I know every tree here, from the Turkey Oaks, which have been planted over the now demolished bandstand, to the spot where the last of the Elm trees stood.

“London, and especially the East End, has always been a magnet for different nationalities and become the place where their lives have grown and flourished. It seemed natural to show Eva, my friend from Iceland, who ended up growing up in London, placed in these fields under the twisting spiraling fingers of the huge London plane tree, which is another European import, adopted and renamed as London’s own.

“I took this image with a large format pinhole camera which a friend of mine made from a recycled hardwood tree. There is no shutter or lens just a pinhole and my glove to open and shut out the light. The icing on the cake came when the snow arrived turning my English garden into an Icelandic wonderland where Eva almost melted into her natural habitat”.

The World in London
Till 12 August 2012
Victoria Park

Enter by Crown Gate East, walk in a north easterly direction down Central Drive towards the bandstand and monument – the exhibition is on the hoardings around the Live Nation Site.