Bank Top

The black and white photographs in the book were all made in an area less than half a mile square in Blackburn during 2019 and 2020. Working with a large-format wooden field camera, Easton spent long days and weeks in the neighbourhood talking to residents and sometimes making pictures. The project melds image and text -- Easton’s portraiture and landscapes combined with poetry and an essay by Aziz Hafiz and with the testimonies of residents. This long-form collaboration acknowledges the issues and impacts of social deprivation, housing, unemployment, immigration and representation, as well as past and present foreign policy. The result is a collective and nuanced portrait of the town -- a sensitive response to the oversimplistic representation of such communities in both the media and by government, which deny the right of Bank Top to tell its own story

Craig Easton is a British photographer who lives in The Wirral and works on long-term social documentary projects that deal with the representation of communities in the North of England.