This project took the form of a solo photo exhibition, with accompanying book, first shown at Venetia’s Coffee Shop in Chatsworth Road, Hackney E5. It is a collection of photographs taken mainly near where I live and work (ie. Hackney and Whitechapel), although two of the images were taken in the area of Bank. The images were taken over a period of about 7 years, the earliest being Corporate Shark, taken in 2004. The images are concerned with being watched, popular culture, the financial crisis and the creative regeneration of the area.
Introduction by Michael Upton:
The job of the photographer, in my view, is not to catalogue indisputable fact but to try to be coherent about intuition and hope. This is not to say that he is unconcerned with the truth. Robert Adams
Eastern Promises is a book of East End Photography by Nick Haeffner. The work focuses on his neighbourhood, Hackney and on the wider ‘E’ postcodes with the odd foray into the City’s ‘EC’. London’s Eastern fringe with its diverse cultural and economic heritage here yields a trove of people, places, creative artefacts and detritus framed through incongruous, sometimes humorous juxtapositions and games with scale. There is melancholy, too, in the Edward Hopper-ish images of commercial premises and ephemeral art. But something more menacing permeates much of the collection.
The book shares its title with the David Cronenberg film which presents the ‘business’ of Russian gangsters in Hackney. The villains hinted at by Nick are closer to home and - technically at least - more legitimate. These ‘Eastern Promises’ speak of Western disappointments, delusions and lies. In the sideways glances of street photography like Nick’s we are able to peek beyond the capitalist framing device and begin to articulate our growing sense of the grand plan gone awry.
There is the mendacity of rampant property acquisition, as another site is ‘acquired by wankers’, the false hope of consumerism, where Tesco supplants a pot of gold at the end of a Morning Lane rainbow; our crises of faith in financial institutions, as a bank is wrapped Christo-like in a death shroud, while an on-looking cherub falls out of love; a dig at cosmetic surgery in ‘Beyond Botox’. In ‘Corporate Shark’, a plush toy shark sleeps alone in the doorway of a former bank; we are at once curious about the absence of its homeless owner, while contemplating the metaphorical great whites who triggered the crisis.
The pedestrians often seem blissfully unaware of the camera and of the context in which it is framing them. Oscar the Grouch leaps from a bin, slightly too big for comfort. Faces on walls, and hanging from stalls appear to be watching. Tom Selleck peers over the rooftops and satellite dishes, at once pop-art and Orwellian.
The ambience is no unhappy accident. While preparing the photographs for this exhibition, Hackney experienced several nights of riots and Nick himself was mugged. But Eastern Promises isn’t relentlessly dark. Rather the vibrancy and good humour of the work offer a visual rebuttal to the repetitive tropes of the media coverage; sodium street lamp flares, massing hoodies and flaming cars in the Pembury Estate. The more abstract collages presented here remind us there is simple old fashioned - and unfashionable - beauty to be savoured in the urban peripheries.
Eastern promises book