Archive

de Susan Andrews, Nicholas Haeffner

"Archive: Imagining the East End accompanies The East End Archive at The Cass, a collection comprised of art and photography concerned with London's East End and its diaspora. The book explores a range of traditional and conceptual approaches, alongside essays discussing the East End and issues associated with archiving. Comprising a wide variety of approaches to photography, Archive: Imagining the East End includes work from a range of artists and photographers including Don McCullin, Tom Hunter, Jo Spence, Joy Gregory, Mike Seaborne and Stephen Gill. Seen as both a geographic and conceptual space, the East End is interpreted as a perpetually shifting frontier within the urban sprawl of London that is part tangible and part imagined, with representations of the area, ranging from traditional documentary to works of the imagination, in order to reflect "our East End": the ever-changing frontier where dreams, dissent and transformation co-exist. Traditional and historic views together with the newly fashionable status of certain areas of the East End are also explored, with essays from leading academics, photographers and archivists which investigate the concept of a photographic archive in historical and theoretical contexts."--