Sat 22nd November: Film about Haggerston estate (Rio Cinema)

SAT 22 Nov • World Premiere

ESTATE, A REVERIE (12A) 2.30(UK 2014) dir. Andrea Luka Zimmerman 83m.

ESTATE, A REVERIE tracks the passing of the Haggerston Estate (1938-2014) in Hackney and the utopian promise of social housing it offered, with an unruly celebration of extraordinary everyday humanity.

Filmed over seven years, ESTATE, A REVERIE seeks to reveal and celebrate the resilience of residents who are profoundly overlooked by media representations and wider social responses. Interweaving intimate portraits with the residents’ own historical re-enactments and dramatised scenes, the film asks how we might resist being framed exclusively through class, gender, ability or disability, and through geography even…

+ post-screening discussion & opening set from singer-songwriter Olivia Chaney & short introduction by Ken Worpole

£4

http://www.riocinema.org.uk/

http://estatefilm.co.uk/

Neil Martinson’s Hackney photo archive

Neil got in touch recently to say that he’s uploaded many of his photos documenting working class life in Hackney in the 1970s and 1980s to his website.

There are sections covering protest, Jewish life, work, street scenes, homelessness and more. Well worth a look!

I first saw his work in the second of the excellent “Working Lives” books published by Centerprise. There is a great interview with Ken Jacobs who wrote the text of the books over at the Yeah Hackney website.

Neil mentions working with Centerprise as well as the Hackney Flashers in the brief “about” page on the site:

I first started taking photographs in 1970 around Hackney with a Zenith E while I was still at school. […] By some kind of fluke I went to Newport College of Art to do a Documentary Photography course led by David Hurn of Magnum. It didn’t work for me and I came back to Hackney where I had been working with a local publishing project called Centerprise. I set up Hackney Flashers with Jo Spence and started to take more photographs in Hackney, especially around work. With a group of photographers and local historians we published a book called Working Lives Volume Two, a collection of personal accounts of work accompanied by documentary photographs. It has been very much inspired by A Fortunate Man by John Berger and Jean Mohr and, in a more subliminal way, the work of the Farm Security Administration photographers in the United States in the 1930’s.

I am hoping to get the chance to speak to Neil about his life and work soon.

Sunday: Hackney Flashers collective at Chats Palace

Hackney Flashers was a radical feminist photography collective, which I’ve previously written about here.

They have recently launched their own website, which is great to see: https://hackneyflashers.co.uk/

There will be a 40 year anniversary event about the group (and its relevance / resonances with today) at Chats Palace this Sunday:

HACKNEY FLASHERS EXPOSED: 40th Anniversary of a Women’s Photographic Collective, 1974-1980

Sunday 12th October 2014, 2-5pm
Chats Palace, 42-44 Brooksby’s Walk, London E9 6DF

The Hackney Flashers Collective was active as a feminist agitprop group in London 1974 -1980. The group produced two photographic/graphic exhibitions addressing complex ideas about women’s lives as workers and as mothers, inside and outside the home:  Women and Work and Who’s Holding the Baby.

To mark the recent launch of the Hackney Flashers website the group are calling a meeting of the generations: how did they work as a collective in the 1970s? How is the struggle for the most basic of women’s rights being carried on now, forty years later?  A rare chance to see some of the exhibition panels from  the time and to discuss work still to be done. Free and open to all. Should be exciting!

The event is part of the East London photography festival Photomonth and will take place at Chats Palace Community Arts Center, a venue which has a history of radical community arts involvement.