arts and design

The view from Bank Top: Craig Easton’s images of life in Blackburn

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Craig Easton rarely tells the subjects of his photographs how they should pose. “I feel that my portraits are gifts that are given to me by those I choose to take pictures of,” he says. Take Mohammed Afzal, an abattoir worker with a passion for pigeons: “I’d seen the loft at the back of his house, and I’d knocked on his door to ask if I could photograph him. The fifth or sixth time we made an arrangement to do this – I kept turning up, but he was always out – he’d just got home, and he was still in his work kit. I thought to myself: this is great. But who am I to say how he should look? He wanted to get showered and changed, and in the end I was pleased that I didn’t impose myself on him. It’s his picture, and he looks just as fabulous in his pristine tracksuit top and jeans.”

Afzal appears in Bank Top, a series of photographs taken by Easton in Blackburn in 2019 and 2020: images that, in turn, were originally part of Kick Down the Barriers, a project instigated by Blackburn Museum and Art Gallery to challenge popular misconceptions of the town. “Kick Down the Barriers was a response to a Panorama programme that asked if Blackburn is the most segregated place in the country,” says Easton. “People were pretty upset – it was so simplistic – and a series of artists were invited to look more closely at its communities.”

Mohammed Afzal with his pigeons in one of several cages he keeps on the tiny back terrace of his house in Johnson Street, Bank Top.

Easton, who lives in Wirral and whose photographs often have to do with the representation of northern communities, decided to work in Bank Top, a mostly working-class area in the west of the town. “I just loved the topography of it. It felt like home. It’s on a steep incline, and there are these rows of terrace houses – they’re old mill-worker cottages – that are very familiar to me, coming from Liverpool. I walked around, and I chatted to people, and as I did, things became tighter and tighter: all the pictures are shot within about 500 yards of each other. What’s extraordinary is that within this tiny community there are so many different experiences, backgrounds, ethnicities and cultures. It’s a whole world.”

Muhammad Ayub outside his second-hand shop on Johnson Street

Easton collaborated with a local writer and researcher, Abdul Aziz Hafiz, whose text accompanied his photographs when they were exhibited in Blackburn (the two men now hope to do a book together). But he always shot alone. “I work with a big, old 1950s camera,” he says. “It’s on a tripod, and it takes me an age to set up, so I’m very visible. But people are curious – and when they get to talking to me, they find that I’m curious about them, too, so I’m welcomed. I try to treat people as individuals. I don’t want them to feel that I see them only as representative of some particular type of person.”

Bank Top, he soon realised, has changed down the decades a lot less than outsiders might imagine. “You can get everything in Bank Top! We’ve started talking, thanks to the pandemic, about how in some places, people have come closer together. But in Bank Top that never went away. People shop locally. They speak to one another. There are three or four butchers, four or five greengrocers, a hairdresser – just in those streets. They’re businesses that are mostly owned by south Asians now, so it’s different to 40 years ago, in the sense that, as the older people will tell you, there are fewer pubs. But in every other way, it’s only the ownership of these places that has changed.”

A few of the pictures in this series are landscapes: a minaret rises above the massed ranks of terraces, at once incongruous and utterly at home; an old mattress lies mournfully in an alley, looking almost human, somehow, as if it had fallen down drunk after a night on the tiles. Here are ancient ginnels and abandoned factories, streets turned temporarily into cricket pitches and front doors kept for best. Mostly, though, they’re of people, whether they’re praying or picking cherries, preparing a chin for a shave or watching their washing go round in the launderette.

Reverend Herrick Daniel, who galvanised the community to buy the Co-op building and turn it into a church

“I was especially interested in photographing the young men,” says Easton. “Because young Asian men get such a terrible press, and that’s so wrong. The lockdown had just ended, and they were enjoying being outside. We talked about how the Asian community had been invited originally to come to Blackburn to save its textile industry [in a brief postwar boom, workers were needed], and about how, when that industry was later decimated, all the work went back to Bangladesh. So these kids were out on the streets, wearing clothes made by people in Bangladesh that would once have been made in Blackburn by their parents. I began to see a kind of connectedness in everything.” In Blackburn, things are not, he says, always what they seem. Consider, for instance, Afzal and his pigeons: “We all know pigeon fancying is a northern, working-class thing. But what I learned is that it’s also a big pastime in Punjab. There are so many layers in these pictures.”

People still come to Blackburn from across the world. “The church is fascinating. It’s an old co-op building. A guy from St Lucia raised the money to buy it. A Nigerian congregation uses it now, and a Russian one. I photographed a lad there who’d literally come from Ukraine just the day before: the church was his point of connection.” Meanwhile, the Muslim community is building a new mosque: “It’s going to be enormous – a sign that the community is on the up.” In a photograph taken in the existing mosque, notices on prayer mats warn worshippers to stay socially distanced. “That was taken just before they were allowed to reopen, and it was a way, for me, of looking at this othering, this blaming, that was going on. There was all this talk of Covid hotspots, but it was very clear to all of us that those had nothing to do with ethnicity; that it had to do with deprivation, and the kinds of employment people were in.”

Three generations of the Williamson family inside and outside their home on Johnson Street, Bank Top

These photographs have, I think, an oddly timeless quality, and not only because they’re shot in black and white (you’ve never seen brick and slate look so gorgeously silvery). The story they tell is an old one. Arrivals are nothing new: in the Industrial Revolution, people from rural areas came to the town. But they connect, too, to the photojournalism of the past. They remind me powerfully of the kind of images I used to see in the Sunday supplements as a teenager. “I suppose that’s why I’m a documentary photographer,” says Easton. “I hope they’re not just for today. You want to record society [for the future].”

He was “surprised and shocked and delighted” to be named overall winner of the Sony world photography awards last week. But the work itself is, I suspect, more important to him than any prize. He’d like to tour the Bank Top series now; to take it out into a world that’s likely to be thinking quite hard about the idea of community. “Segregation and integration are these words that get thrown about all the time,” he says. “But what we found was a place of congregation, and that’s the story I would like to tell.”

The Sony World Photography awards 2021 virtual exhibition, documentary and free book download are available via worldphoto.org. See more of Craig Easton’s Bank Top photographs at craigeaston.com

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