Bank Top

The black and white photographs in the book were all made in an area less than half a mile square in Blackburn during 2019 and 2020. Working with a large-format wooden field camera, Easton spent long days and weeks in the neighbourhood talking to residents and sometimes making pictures. The project melds image and text — Easton’s portraiture and landscapes combined with poetry and an essay by Aziz Hafiz and with the testimonies of residents. This long-form collaboration acknowledges the issues and impacts of social deprivation, housing, unemployment, immigration and representation, as well as past and present foreign policy. The result is a collective and nuanced portrait of the town — a sensitive response to the oversimplistic representation of such communities in both the media and by government, which deny the right of Bank Top to tell its own story