Billy Bragg
Abandon hope all ye who enter here: the Curse of Twitter is that perception always trumps intention
Book Recommendations:
Recommended by Billy Bragg
“When Blackburn was described as the most segregated town in Britain, photographer @craig_easton set out to challenge the one-dimensional portrayal of northern towns. His brilliant new book 'Bank Top' portrays Blackburn's diverse working class community https://t.co/4WPTodZX2h” (from X)
The black and white photographs in the book were all made in an area less than half a mile square in Blackburn during 2019 and 2020. Working with a large-format wooden field camera, Easton spent long days and weeks in the neighbourhood talking to residents and sometimes making pictures. The project melds image and text ― Easton’s portraiture and landscapes combined with poetry and an essay by Aziz Hafiz and with the testimonies of residents. This long-form collaboration acknowledges the issues and impacts of social deprivation, housing, unemployment, immigration and representation, as well as past and present foreign policy. The result is a collective and nuanced portrait of the town ― a sensitive response to the oversimplistic representation of such communities in both the media and by government, which deny the right of Bank Top to tell its own story