In 1985 Berris Conolly lived in Stoke Newington and worked as a commercial photographer. In his spare time he walked the borough, noting the street corners, the facades and signage of the city, following the waterways and exploring the aesthetics of the ordinary – what is seen and how it might be seen. Some of the photographs from that period form the basis of this exhibition.
Memories of the 1981 city riots were still fresh, and the Metropolitan Police had lately been earning their overtime in the northern coalfields, public services in Hackney, as elsewhere, were under assault from the advocates of the political and economic virtues of market forces. Conolly is not directly concerned with this narrative, he was walking his usual beat, assessing the visual weight of the everyday, sifting it and sieving it, ensuring that his camera bestows on the commonplace its due dignity.

Twenty five years later and another photographer Alex Pink is on the same mission, photographing the details of his locale for his Snapshot London project.
He comes across the book of Conolly’s work from the earlier period (Hackney Photographs 1985-1987) and it is his idea to remake them. The pictures in this exhibition are a result of the ensuing collaboration.Pink has described the job of following in another photographer’s footsteps as daunting. To retake a scene exactly removes many creative possibilities – what is to be included and what left out is no longer his to decide. The only authorial gesture Pink has allowed himself is to include his bicycle, his preferred mode of transport, in some of the images. Nonetheless he has produced photographs that stand out in their own right – the containers stacked on the corner of Pearson Street, a slice of anonymous commerce pasted on a residential landscape, attract the urban investigator; the colours at the corner of Linscott Road the visual artist.

Photographs, it has been argued, are instantly nostalgic, and Past & Present pictures can function in a story of loss. Hackney Stadium, dog-track and speedway, has disappeared under the new Media Centre being built for the London Olympics – an example of the local small-scale being swallowed by the very different priorities of the Grand Project. The stadium is pictured in Conolly’s book but the current defence of the site by the Olympic authorities has meant that Pink has not yet been able to make a contemporary image.

In 1985 one of the most contested areas of public space was high-rise housing. The towers stud the horizon of a number of Conolly’s pictures, they background Hackney Downs and filter beds, they fringe Springfield Park; the infamous Holly Street looms over Albion Square. They have now almost entirely disappeared – a story of a failed system of public housing perhaps, but also hinting at other political conflicts and the processes of privatisation and gentrification, already underway at the time of the original photographs.

Past & Present pictures can also emphasise what persists in a way that photographs of the past alone seldom do. This is partly because of the often slow-changing physical structure of rivers, roads and railways which themselves embody in their routes all manner of layers of history, a palimpsest that doesn’t just excite the imagination of psychogeographers but is part of the everyday mapping of life in the city. They also employ the connectivity that photography suggests – the archiving of detail and an insistence on everything in the image being of equal graphic consequence.

This results in the appearance and reappearance of elements that, even in times and areas of change, are below the planners’ radar and off the balance sheet of corporate enterprise. Continuities abound – the original book opens with an image of beech trees in Springfield Park, and they stand sentinel in Pink’s version in much the same way.
Victory Café is now First Sep Café, but Holywell Row is recognisably the same place. In Broadway Market the jumble of two storey buildings has been recreated as a three storey block in the style of one of the original buildings. Sharon Party Wear (boarded up) has gone, as has I.A. Blight ‘Family Millers’ and M&J Mainzer ‘Paper, String, Paperbags, Wrappings’, but next door the launderette survives in its original premises, as does the fish & chip shop on the corner of Ada Street.

Gustave Doré’s etchings of Victorian London include a number of views looking down from elevated railway lines into the teeming streets and yards of the city. Critics at the time complained of the book’s focus on “the commonest, most vulgar” aspects of the capital, and the etchings presage a perceived division between a civilised suburbia and an urban inferno that still claims attention today.
In his 1992 book A Journey Through Ruins Patrick Wright imagines academics travelling on the London to Cambridge railway line above London Fields, seeing Hackney with that same distorted perspective. London Fields appears in this exhibition, a playground then (campaigned for by residents in the 1970’s) and a playground now. The image of the city as inferno has resurfaced in recent weeks as a result of the disturbances in London and elsewhere.
Perhaps one of the strengths of these photographs, made on the ground by photographers walking their own neighbourhood, is their subliminal assertion of the possibility of an everyday life lived without malice or despair.

Adrian Wynn 2011