Market Day by Paul Trevor book review: Capturing the theatre of Brick Lane
Street photographer Paul Trevor captures the scenes and emotions of East End market days near Brick Lane over the years
The market street seen from above looks like a grey river of hats. Old and young hands eagerly sift through piles of clothing. A young girl performs on an empty market stall, her smile strange and frozen.
Paul Trevor has been a photographer since the early 70s, capturing daily life with an empathy and obsession that’s produced some of the East End’s most compelling street photography to date.
Market Day depicts market days on and around Brick Lane between 1974 and 1992. Most of the photos are of Brick Lane market, with Petticoat Lane market also included.
Both famous markets are still going strong, but slowly becoming less essential to life in the East End. Supermarkets, fast-fashion retailers and online shopping have decentralised the weekly shop, meaning our markets have lost the pulsating drama Trevor captures in the book.
Trevor remembers an East End that was deprived and often derelict. ‘I was drawn to the Sunday market by the people, by the contrast between the energy they created and the run-down state of the place, and by the spontaneous and highly visual “street theatre” on display,’ he says in the book’s opening passage. ‘Like theatre, the show was repeated weekly, but the performance was never the same. You never knew what to expect, which is probably why I persisted with it for so long!‘
He used a quiet and light 35mm Leica rangefinder to capture his market days, shooting with black and white film.
The book opens on a Sunday morning, with a birds-eye photo of the market just opened and flooded with people. Because of the historically large Jewish community in the East End market days are typically a Sunday, to avoid the Sabbath. Traditionally, Jewish people observe the Sabbath from Friday evening to Saturday evening.
People jostle shoulders for deals, eat dance and argue. Later, as the book passes through the hours of the day, we see the crowds thin and the skeletons of stalls as they are dismantled. Trevor balances the love of his subjects with a gloomy realism.
The final photos are of nightfall with darkened empty streets that echo a busy day behind. The chronological morning-to-night format ties 20-plus years of photography together to create one endless Sunday.
Trevor began photographing at age 25 in 1972, after a pivotal train ride where he asked himself ‘If you could do anything, what would you do?’ He quit his job as an accountant and formed the Exit Photography Group along with Nicholas Battye, Diane Olsen and Alex Slotskin while studying photography in 1973.
The group’s second book Survival Programmes documented the UK’s growing inner-city crisis. It was supposed to span six months and ended up spanning six years – a preview of the completionist tendencies that have marked Trevor’s career since. He returned to photographing the East End with his teeth cut.
Trevor helped set up the Half Moon Photography Workshop just off Brick Lane in 1975. From there he helped found Camerawork magazine in 1976, the UK’s first radical photography magazine.
In the 90s Trevor lost his darkroom as film photography was eclipsed by the digital and Brick Lane entered the first stages of its rapid gentrification. Only then did he begin sorting through the piles of unsorted negatives he’d accumulated over the years, which he’d been storing unpublished as a kind of diary.
Market Day is the third book in what Trevor is calling his ‘Eastender Series’, following photobooks ‘Once Upon a Time in Brick Lane’ (2019) and ‘In Your Face’ (2020). ‘Once Upon a Time in Brick Lane,’ (now sold out) featured never-before-seen photography from Brick Lane taken in the 70s and 80s. ‘In Your Face’ drew similarly on his archive photography of The City of London and Brick Lane to speak class divide during Thatcher’s reign.
The ‘Eastender Series,’ will be Trevor’s magnum opus of East End photography, spanning 1973 to the present day. ‘It’s my Harry Potter,’ he said, hinting at four more books to come.
Dorothea Lange once said every photo is a self-portrait of the photographer. In that case, Trevor is a very patient person. Market Day is a beautiful book, executed with care.
Market Day is being released on October 17th and will be published with Hoxton Mini-Press. You can buy it at Hoxtonminipress.com and see a preview below:
If you liked this read ‘Whoretographer’ Poppy Pray snaps the golden years of the Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club