Here's a review of the wonderful Dalston Anatomy I did for Manik Katyal over at Emaho Magazine. It looks much nicer there.
Every now and then, a photography book comes along that
looks completely different. Dalston Anatomy by Lorenzo Vitturi is one of those
books; a sculptural, colour-soaked dance through the community of Dalston’s
Ridley Road Market.
The photographic music starts with the cover, which is
decorated with an African-themed fabric sourced in the market. Open the pages
and the colour gets straight into its rhythm. A statue of pig trotters against
a red background segue into a portrait of a local resident wearing a Hello
Kitty Hat with that red background picking up the beat. The white goes to green
and then we see a collage consisting of a 2-dimensional portrait of a woman,
her hair wrapped in white fabric, with another piece of cloth nailed over the
portrait.
Right from the start, Vitturi’s organic colour-based
approach jumps off the page. This is a book with a rhythm and a sophistication
that goes beyond the simple two-dimensional image. Instead pictures and objects
are modified to create what Vitturi sees as an anatomical dissection of the
market, products and people of Ridley Road.
Vitturi’s role as a photographer is to reimagining these
elements into a sequence that revealed the deeper layers of the market; Vitturi
sees himself as a photographic surgeon, using the scalpel of his lens to
uncover the anatomy of Dalston’s Market.
Strangest of all in this mix are the sculptures that Vitturi
made and photographed in his studio. These are precarious affairs, short-lived
concoctions that call to mind the primitive art that can be found in Sigmund’s
Freud’s house, non-mechanical combines that are half-Danny Treacy and half
Robert Rauschenberg.
One sculpture is of half a cassava sitting on a fish head,
with acid-coloured hair breads reaching out. At the base of the sculpture there
is a scattering of a pink powder. The Freudian reference invites us to analyse
the contents of the sculpture, and lead us into the cosmopolitan community that
forms the clientele for the market.
Another sculpture shows unknown tubers piled on top of a
cracked open coconut. At its base is a sprinkle of yellow powder. Across the
page the yellow powder appears again, scattered over the face of a woman
dressed in red. She’s wearing beads in the colours of Ghana, part of an
continuous reference to the diversity of the people who work, shop and live in
Ridley Road.
The ethnic make-up of the market is further explored the
text that runs through the middle of the book; pawpaw or papaya, Jesus Saves,
Dominican Mangoes, Yiddish women in wigs and people come and gone are all
referenced. African, Asian, Hindu, Muslim and Jew rub together. There are
Pakistanis and Turks and old-style cockneys from an area of London that has
been first port of call for newly arrived migrants to the city for hundreds of
years. Where once it was Jews and Jamaicans fleeing pogroms or seeking work,
now Turks and Poles who are coming into the area; and using its market as a
recognisable place of refuge in a city that is less welcoming to the outsiders
than it once was.
Dalston Anatomy is a celebration of a London that once was,
a memory of a city that is changing into a place for the rich and nobody else. There
are vans going round London telling illegal immigrants to go back home, there
is a social cleansing where the poor of London are being shipped out of
over-priced housing to cheaper boroughs in the midlands and beyond. Once
affordable properties in once affordable
boroughs are being redeveloped into gentrified properties for a middle class that is being squeezed out of
inner suburbs that have become the homes for the international super-rich. As the
city gets richer, and the poor get poorer and so do the middle classes. As a
result, great swathes of London are now barely affordable for anybody but the
abominably wealthy.
And with that wealth comes conformity and a brutal
blandness. Dalston Anatomy is the antithesis of bland. It is a book that
celebrates the diversity of life; food, of dress, of being who you are. In
terms of structure, it is supremely made, with colour, texture and shape feeding
into a nuanced view of how the people, places and goods of Ridley Road Market interact. More importantly
than that, however, it is a book that has a heart, a rhythm and a soul. And
that is what makes it so very special.
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