Local heroes
If you’re stuck for a photo project idea look no further than your own neighbourhood. Here three photographers show us what’s on their doorstep
We talk to three photographers who have found inspiration close to home – with some impressive results
The Englishman and the Eel is a journey into the culture of that most London of institutions, the eel, pie and mash shop. In a sense it follows on from my last book, The Palaces of Memory, which was about the forgotten spaces of the Indian coffee houses – my shelter during 20 years of working and sometimes living in India. The palaces reminded me of my own past growing up in Hackney in the 1970s and, after spending much of my working life in the developing world, I wanted to re-explore this.
Eel, pie and mash shops, along with rough pubs and greasy spoon cafes, were the landmarks of my upbringing and I felt it would be interesting to document a culture I grew up in but travelled away from. I’ve photographed and written about 30 of these shops in and around London. They hold the memories of a largely undocumented working-class culture. In decline, they are however still recognisable – serving warm comfort food. Steam. Tea. Laughter. In Essex, the East End’s new spiritual home, they are undergoing something of a renaissance – identifying as they do with a reimagined and distilled working-class culture that’s geographically separate from its traditional roots. Talk, listen and wait The execution of the project was relatively straightforward. The resulting book is not encyclopaedic, rather I wanted to record the most interesting culture of the places. I extended the work outwards, shooting eel fishing in Lough Neagh in Northern Ireland as well as two of the remaining eel processors in London. I also wanted to explain the changed landscape by including East Enders too frail and elderly to get to the shops. I photographed them at home, with the food brought to them. In terms of execution of the work, I do what I usually do – talk, listen and wait. The key to good reportage is time and if you spend long enough, good images will come. I don’t think anybody refused to have their picture taken and I captured customers and staff going about their daily lives. In terms of narrative, I decided early on to document the rhythm of the day, from opening up to closing, ensuring that I had a comprehensive list of images but
leaving enough space for serendipity. It was a simple matter of observing the ebb and flow of daily life and those moments that were both interesting and banal, and making the best images that I could.
I shot the series with two cameras and two lenses – a Leica M-240-P and f/1.4 35mm Summilux lens and a Canon EOS 5D Mark III with a 50mm f/1.4 lens.
I’ve spent much of my career as an assignment photographer for magazines but I’ve always tried to pitch editors stories that I feel are important, and that speak to me in some way. When I left university in 1989 (I did a politics degree, nothing to do with photography) one of the first places I photographed to try and build a portfolio was the (now closed) local pie and mash shop I’d grown up with in Dalston. Years later in 2011, I pitched (successfully) a story to a German magazine about the shop’s culture and it was that that made me realise how significant the shops were and how they, and the eel in general, – rare, endangered but surviving – could be used as a metaphor for both the culture that I come from and my own journey.
To back Stuart’s crowd-funding campaign to produce a beautiful limited edition book of this project visit Kickstarter.com and search ‘ The Englisman and the Eel - London’s Eel, Pie & Mash shops’.