Bailey's East End

Description

The idea for a book on the East End formed sometime in the 1980s. The London Docks had already closed down or were starting to. I chose to shoot mainly in the districts of Silvertown and Canning Town. I have over the years spent many weekends shooting whatever took my fancy. The other two times I had bursts of photographic energy in the East End were in the 1960s and from about 2004 to 2010. These were my three key periods to draw pictures from, instead of just trolling through the last fifty years of archives. In the late 1940s and early 1950s I heard a quote on the radio, "Go west, young man." At the time I didn't give it much thought. Later I assumed it was from America and that it went back to the middle of the nineteenth century, when America's west coast was opening up to great wealth and opportunities. The cockneys should have listened, but they didn't. They went east like their ancestors before them. The ones that moved east out of 'Old Nichol' went to Whitechapel, then on to Stepney and Bow, then to what is now called Newham and later to Barking, Dagenham and onto Essex.

David Bailey has been at the top of his profession for over forty years. Among his other books are If We Shadows, The Lady is a Tramp, Archive One, Locations, Chasing Rainbows and David Bailey's Rock and Roll Heroes, all published byThames & Hudson.

This three-volume work by English photographer David Bailey is one of the best books of the year. East End, published this summer by Steidl, gathers 620 photographs taken by Bailey in this working-class district of London. Bailey watched the East End grow from the 1960s to the 2000s. This proximity is on display in the first volume, dedicated to David's mother, Catherine, which features scenes of intimacy, parties, street life, and countless black-and-white and color portraits of family and strangers from the photographer's youth. Readers are invited to lose themselves in the daily lives of workers, longshoremen, shops, markets, boxing rings and pubs.--Jonas Cuenin "L'Oeil de la Photographie"