In conversation with Billy Bragg for PhotoLondon

The good folk at PhotoLondon selected BANK TOP as their book club ‘Book of the Month’ with a lovely review: https://photolondon.org/book-club/bank-top/ and I was joined by the great Billy Bragg for an ‘in-conversation’ this week in which we looked at various issues the work aims to examine. We talked about challenging stereotypes and simplistic labelling by the media (Blackburn as ‘segregated’ and Billy’s home town of Barking as ‘racist’), and we talked about the similarities between photography and music in how we try to present new perspectives…

FISHERWOMEN Time & Tide Museum, Great Yarmouth until 19th September

It has been much delayed due to the pandemic, but I glad to say that the FISHERWOMEN show has finally opened at Time & Tide Museum in Great Yarmouth. This is the most comprehensive exhibition of the work to date (with more shows to follow…) and I’m grateful to Philip and his team for such a beautiful installation.

Here’s some pictures…

… and a few from an outing for the work in New Bedford Massachusetts - outdoor exhibition until 17th Oct. if you are over that way…

Photography on the radio... who knew?

It’s a funny thing… as a photographer I wouldn’t expect to find myself on BBC Radio Four ‘pick of the week’, but that’s what happened.

And as an avid Radio Four listener of 40 years or more, I’m inordinately chuffed!

The credit goes to my pal, Miles Warde, radio producer at BBC Bristol. During the seven years that I was making the FISHERWOMEN work, I recorded some conversations with some of the women I met. Their stories were extraordinary and I made the recordings principally for information so that I could transcribe them and use certain passages as text in exhibitions and the portfolio that Ten O’Clock Books published. Then about six weeks ago I sent some of those recordings to Miles and lo and behold three weeks later, he’s made the most wonderful radio programme from them for ‘Open Country’.

The response was wonderful, it has been a privilege to be able to record these memories alongside the photographs I made and a big thank you to Miles for handling it so beautifully… and for getting us on ‘Pick of the Week!’ (can you tell I’m smiling?)

You can here the show here: https://www.craigeaston.com/fisherwomen (scroll down to the bottom of the page)

Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

Photographer of the Year, Sony World Photography Awards 2021

Well, what a couple of weeks it’s been. A whirlwind of press and media interviews and an opportunity to share work from my series Bank Top which looks at the representation and misrepresentation of the north of England with a particular focus on a tight knit community in Blackburn. The work challenges the notion that Blackburn is ‘the most segregated town in Britain’ (BBC Panorama) and examines the impacts of this kind of divisive and misleading media representation.

I was delighted then to have the work recognised at the prestigious Sony World Photography Awards and to receive the honour of Photographer of the Year, 2021.

What is especially thrilling is that it creates a platform for this work to be seen not just in Blackburn, not just nationally, but internationally. The stories that my collaborator Aziz Hafiz and I heard in Bank Top are, in many ways, universal stories that have a resonance beyond the small community. Rather than a place of ‘segregation’ what we found was a place of ‘congregation’ where people have come together from all corners of the world for generations. Our work, we hope, celebrates the vibrancy of the Bank Top community in all its diversity and challenges those who seek to divide us with their dangerous rhetoric.

Links below to the Sony WPA film, plus recordings from BBC Newsnight and Radio Four Front Row.

https://vimeo.com/543157670

https://vimeo.com/540049930/9999cd7820

https://vimeo.com/540051057

You can see the selection of the work on the Sony WPA website here: https://www.worldphoto.org/2021-professional-competition-winners

And the wider set on this site in the ‘series’ section: https://www.craigeaston.com/bank-top

We are currently working on a book of this series which we hope will be out later this year. Please sign up to the newsletter for updates.

Many thanks

Craig

A week in Nelson

Back in October, during the brief hiatus between COVID lockdowns I was invited by In-Situ to make a series of portraits in the east Lancashire town of Nelson.

https://www.in-situ.org.uk/post/craig-easton-a-week-in-nelson

Bank Top Exhibition, Blackburn

Work from my new series BANK TOP is on show at Blackburn Museum & Art Gallery until 21st November. 
The work is the result of a year long collaboration with writer Abdul Aziz Hafiz and the people of the Bank Top community in Blackburn challenging as Aziz puts it the “simplistic representation of Blackburn and the callous use of the word ‘segregation’ by policymakers and the media when they try to explain the challenges faced by such neighbourhoods and towns.”
Part of the Kick Down The Barriers project and my own wider work in mis-represented, maligned and often forgotten northern communities. 

Fisherwomen publication

Portfolio & Artist’s Editions

I’m delighted to announce that Ten O’Clock Books here in the UK have published a beautiful portfolio of work from my series FISHERWOMEN.

The work is the culmination of a seven-year long project that examines and celebrates the historical and contemporary importance of women to the fishing industry. Following the route of the traditional herring fleet from Shetland to Great Yarmouth, the project combines large format portraits and landscapes with extraordinary anecdotes to weave a narrative of a unique history of British working women.

Available in two editions:

Portfolio Edition: Twenty-four page 11”x15” folio on Mohawk Superfine 118gsm paper plus A5 insert ‘Photography and Fisherwomen: A shared history’ by Rachel Nordstrom, Photography Collections Manager at The University of St. Andrews Special Collections. Signed and numbered edition of 500. Available here.

Artist’s Edition: As above and presented in a clothbound hardcover with an original 12”x16” print of ‘The hands that gut the herring’. Both portfolio and print signed and numbered edition of 50. Available here.

The Famine Road, Eavan Boland (1944-2020)

Sad to hear of the death of the wonderful Irish poet Eavan Boland who passed away yesterday. 
I spoke to her in 2018 as I was making work in Ireland in the early stages of an ongoing project: 'The Landscape of Ideology’.
She kindly gave me permission to use her poem ‘The Famine Road’, as an accompaniment to my picture made at Killary Harbour, Co. Connemara. 

I don’t think I’ve ever felt such an eerie sense of disquiet as I walked out alone on a cold November dawn along a path of broken rock laid out in the mid 1800s by impoverished men and women during the Great Famine. I still feel it now as I remember that day trudging in the wild beauty of the Fjord with a backpack, tripod, my old Deardorff camera and a few darkslides of film - all alone yet strangely not alone.

The ‘road' was built ‘from nowhere going nowhere of course’, as part of a slavish insistence on the prevailing ideological belief in ‘laissez-faire’ economics: a conviction that any kind of benevolent state welfare would create a lazy dependency among the poor and that the answer lay not in government assistance for those in need, but in a requirement for them to undertake hard labour on what were essentially futile projects in exchange for meagre rations. Hundreds of thousands died of exhaustion and starvation in the service of early free-market ideology, all whilst food was still being exported for profit in vast quantities from the east coast ports.

Eavan Boland's anger and compassion resonate fiercely in her verse......

Fisherwomen on BBC Radio Four 'Front Row'

Last week I spoke to Kirsty Lang for BBC Radio Four’s arts programme ‘Front Row’ about my ‘Fisherwomen’ exhibition at Hull Maritime Museum which runs from August 24th - October 27th.

SIXTEEN Exhibitions, Liverpool

Very proud to have brought the group project I’ve been leading, ‘SIXTEEN’, to Liverpool and Southport.

Work on show at Tate Liverpool, Open Eye Gallery, Ropes and Twines and The Atkinson, Southport and earlier at The Williamson in Birkenhead.

Great to see some of the young people come down to see themselves on the gallery walls and to witness the sense of pride they felt at having their stories heard.

Here’s a few pics……

In order:

Installation at Tate, Liverpool

Saul, with his picture at Tate, Liverpool - see his story below

Halima at Ropes and Twines (story below)

Ridah at Ropes and Twines (story below)

Saul, 16, Sunderland

"I’ve been in care since I was a year and a half years old. I’m now classed as a care leaver. Social services, say I’m actually the worst case they’ve ever brought into care. Ever.

I got put into numerous foster placements and then when I was about fourteen I got put in a care home. Everything started falling apart and then I moved to Wales and it got to the point where I tried to kill myself, in three weeks, one hundred and forty-seven times. I got put in hospital. They were sectioning me and all this… it got really far. 

The hospital let me go and I was fine and I felt ‘I want to get a piercing’. I already had my ears done. That was the start of it. I went to a piercing studio and I got my bridge done and then suddenly I didn’t feel as I was wanting to hurt myself anymore. And I was, like, ‘I don’t understand’. Next time I felt like it I went and got my lip done and that was the new way for me to self harm and for it to not look as bad as it should.

It was only because of the problems and issues I had that I started getting piercings and that.

Self harmer’s will say to you that the reason they cut themselves is because they feel they’re not there, they don’t exist and they cut themselves to feel the pain so they know they’re real. It was only because of the problems and issues I had that I started getting piercings and that. When I need to self harm, I don’t self harm I go and get a piercing."

Halima, 16, Nelson, Lancashire

“I want to be happy and I feel like the one way you can win in life is just to be happy and right now I’m happy with things and even though I get emotional or I get negative thoughts I just think ‘be grateful for where you are. Just be grateful’ ”

Ridah, 16, Brierfield, Lancashire

“You look at me and I’m brown obviously cause my skin colour’s brown so you probably think I’m a Muslim but I don’t really… I know I shouldn’t be saying this but….I’m not really Islamic. Most Muslims wear scarf, like it’s the way they’re portrayed isn’t it, like you should wear scarf, do this, do that, can’t go out. You’re not allowed to do this. Men. Women. It’s all biased. I don’t like it. At all.

Stereotypical, that’s what it is. Stereotypical.”

FC Barcelona Photography Awards

I'm delighted to announce that my photograph 'Arshia Ghorbani, 16, Toxteth, Liverpool' has won first prize in the inaugural FC Barcelona Photo Awards.

The awards were set up to "celebrate the positive intrinsic values common to sport and culture and to communicate the importance and contribution of those values to current society." Arshia’s story is an example of the power of sport in society and a testament to the kind of community spirit that I experience all around the world and especially in Liverpool. It is that spirit of humanity, of welcoming and of togetherness that so enriches our society and must, in the end, prevail over those that spread hate and isolationism.

Arshia is an asylum seeker from Iran now living in Liverpool while he waits for his refugee status to be assessed. As a teenager he has many challenges to face to fit into a new community and new society, not least the challenge of learning a new language and continuing his education in a strange environment. The first thing he did when he came to Liverpool was play football as a way to make new friends and feel accepted. He plays for Kingsley United in Toxteth, known as Liverpool's 'most diverse' football team. He is sixteen years old and tells his story in his own words: he has written his testimony/caption in his native language: Farsi.

An English translation:

Hello My name is Arshia Ghorbani and I was born in 01.02.2000. That means that I am 16 years old now. I’m happy person normally but sometimes I can get angry as well. The only thing that I do cheerfully and lovingly is football. I started playing football with an adult team since I was 8 years old which made me good progress in football. I have a lot of plans and dreams, too many!! I like go to school and learning. I really enjoyed of my school and it’s lovely staff and never want to leave the school. I know that all people can’t reach they dreams. It is difficult and hard work to access my dreams. To be a surgeon doctor is one of my main aims. I am good at learning and understanding in school. My first language is one of my main barriers between me and my dreams. It is now just 3 years that I am living in UK, but even now I can’t understand some of the written words; on the other hand I can speak English very well. One of my other problems is that we can’t go on holiday, we are not allowed to travel, we can’t buy a car even if we had the money, as my Dad is not allowed to get a licence, and we don’t have permission for work. That all means we can’t make any decision for our future because we are asylum seekers. That all makes a teenage boy like me to be in desperation and stressful which is not good at my age. Unfortunately I can’t go to university because I am asylum seeker. I know it’s not the UK government fault, but if we think I had potential to be a doctor in future and I could save hundreds of humans lives. I like to help people and made smile on their face who poor and need help. That is the thing other people do for me when I was in need. Anyway I keep going on with the hope and the stress. I don’t let any problem keep me away from my dreams. I can’t and don’t want to make blame on my family or anyone for the situation I have. You must know that nothing is reached easily in the life and you must try hard. If it was easy everyone would be happy and joyful.

https://photoawards.fcbarcelona.com/winfoto/?lang=en

This photograph is part of my early work on a group project I am leading with fifteen other photographers all around the UK. The project 'Sixteen' looks at the experience, ambitions, dreams, hopes and fears of sixteen year olds from all walks of life all around the country.

A large format C-type print measuring 150cm x 94cm will be unveiled at the awards ceremony and exhibition to be held in Barcelona in June.