“In the Eighties, Hackney was a really poor place,” Martinson remembers. “There was actually excessive ranges of unemployment, the excessive road was rundown, the estates had been falling aside. However there have been no food banks.” The photographer is eager, he explains, to not romanticise the Eighties – a time which undoubtedly had many issues of its personal – however to spotlight these modifications in Hackney’s make-up.
His newest photographs from the borough – in which Hackney Foodbank now operates throughout 5 totally different areas every week– typically confront these modifications head on. One picture exhibits store employee Matt Payne. Closely tattooed, with a moustache and carrying a decent white vest, he stands in classic clothes store, Past Retro. Forty one years in the past, Martinson took a picture of one other employee on nearly precisely the identical spot. Solely then, he was in the Simpsons clothes manufacturing unit.
