#59 CAMERA Book Review: Zed Nelson - A Portrait of Hackney

A talk through the wonderful 'A Portrait of Hackney' by Zed Nelson. 96pp hardcover, quarter-bound cloth spine, gold foiled, 145 x 205mm published by Hoxton Mini Press.

Zed Nelson's A Portrait of Hackney was published by Hoxton Mini Press in 2014 as part of the East London Photo Stories series. Having lived in Hackney since childhood, Nelson turned his attention to the borough after many years photographing conflict, identity and contemporary social issues around the world. Rather than producing a comprehensive survey of the area, he created a photographic essay examining Hackney during a period of rapid urban redevelopment and demographic change. The book combines portraits, street scenes and urban landscapes with fragments of overheard conversations, documenting the complexity of a borough where longstanding working class communities, recent immigrants and new affluent residents occupied the same rapidly changing environment.

Nelson's photographs explore the coexistence of wealth and poverty, renewal and neglect, recording the physical and social contradictions that characterised Hackney in the years following extensive regeneration. His observational approach avoids reducing the borough to either decline or gentrification, instead presenting a nuanced account of everyday life through carefully composed documentary images. By concentrating on ordinary streets, public spaces and the people who inhabit them, A Portrait of Hackney provides a visual record of one of London's most diverse boroughs at a moment of significant transformation, continuing Nelson's wider examination of the fault lines that shape contemporary society.

Zed Nelson
Hoxton Mini Press

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