SHOREDITCH WILD LIFE

The tragi-comic side of Shoreditch

Shoreditch Wild Life grew out of more than fifteen years of living in the area. I never went out without a camera. At first, the photographs were made at night: parties, pubs, club queues and the search for somewhere to go after the official night had finished. Later, the camera moved into daylight, finding the older residents, street vendors, shopkeepers, revellers, dogs and hangers-on who give the neighbourhood its particular energy.

The project developed as Shoreditch changed around me. Old and new, rich and poor, locals and visitors, fashion and survival all share the same streets. Markets sit beside designer shops. Graffiti, advertising and street art compete for the same walls. Jewish history, immigrant businesses, nightlife, poverty and new development overlap in a neighbourhood that never stays still for long.

Shoreditch has always attracted people who want to be seen. Some arrive dressed for the clubs, some are working the streets, some are selling, performing, protesting or simply trying to get through the day. Style becomes a kind of language, and every group has its own codes, uniforms and ambitions. The area’s energy comes from that collision, but so does its tension.

I don’t sit and wait for something to happen. If I see something, I run across the street and photograph it. None of the pictures are staged, but many are reactions to my presence. The camera changes the dynamic. People look back, challenge it, perform for it or momentarily forget it is there. That brief exchange is where the photograph begins.

The work is close, direct and deliberately uncomfortable at times. The flash brings out the colour, the surfaces and the strange details, but it also refuses to let the scene dissolve into atmosphere. The people remain present: looking, posing, laughing, drinking, working, waiting and trying to hold on to their place in the picture.

Living in Shoreditch helped me develop an eye for the tragi-comic and messy side of uninhibited human behaviour. The photographs can be loud, brash and visually exaggerated, but the situations themselves are not invented. They are social realities, played out in public and often pushed a little further by the camera.

The series moves from the party at its height to the human rubble of the morning after. It finds the glamour and the grime, the ridiculous and the unexpectedly touching. A glamorous outfit can sit beside a broken pavement. A carefully posed portrait can collapse into an awkward grin. Behind every attempt to look in control, there is usually something else going on.

Shoreditch Wild Life is not a guide to a polished version of East London. It is a portrait of a place in flux, where people are constantly arriving, leaving, adapting and performing. The neighbourhood’s rough edges may change, but the street remains a theatre of human behaviour.

You might love it or hate it, but Shoreditch is difficult to ignore. Its old life and new life continue to collide in public, and that collision is where the pictures live.